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THE PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING 



THE 



Philosophy of Preaching 




A. J. F, BEHRENDS, D.D. 

Pastor of the Central Congregational Church, 
Brooklyn, N.Y. 






tit 



"d.0 




NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1890 



J3V4- 



$* 






COPYRIGHT, 1890, 
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 



TO MY WIFE 



PBEEATOBY NOTE. 

This little volume contains the lectures 
given in the month of February of the pres- 
ent year, before the Divinity School of Yale 
University, on the Lyman Beecher founda- 
tion. It is not a treatise on homiletics. The 
questions connected with the preparation and 
the delivery of sermons have been intention- 
ally passed by. The aim has been to deal 
with the more fundamental inquiry of the 
end of all preaching, and to emphasize the 
universal elements of all effective religious 
address. There has been no citation of 
authorities, for the simple reason that none 
were consulted and used. The views here 
presented had slowly taken form during a 
ministry of twenty-five years, and they have 
at least the merit of profound personal con- 
viction, which the author has been encour- 



Vill PREFATORY NOTE. 

aged, by friends in whose critical judgment 
he has great confidence, to believe may be 
of service to a wider circle than the one to 
which they were first given. The form of 
direct address has been preserved, as a change 
of literary dress would have involved a rad- 
ical reconstruction of the material, with the 
danger of an enlargement in bulk, which 
might have proved unwelcome to the reader. 
For in an age when many books are written, 
brevity is a quality which every busy student 
appreciates. A J F B 

Brooklyn, N.Y., March, 1890. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

The Philosophy of Preaching. 1 1 

The Philosophy of Preaching. II. . . B , 24 

The Personal Element in Preaching ... 57 

The Ethical Element in Preaching ... 78 

The Biblical Element in Preaching . . . 104 

The Spiritual Element in Preaching. I. . 130 

The Spiritual Element in Preaching. II. . 166 

The Practical Element in Preaching . . 196 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF PEEACHING. 
I. 

No man can achieve solid and satisfactory 
success in any calling, who is not convinced 
that the services which he renders are of 
substantial benefit to the public, and that 
what he gives is a full equivalent for what 
he receives. He who suspects that he is 
merely tolerated, or that he occupies the 
place of a dependent, or who discovers that 
he is retained when he has ceased to supply 
a living demand, inevitably suffers in the 
consciousness of manly independence ; and 
where manhood shrivels, work loses its dig- 
nity and power. I have always admired 
the spirit of the man, who is said to have 
applied for employment to a wealthy and 
charitable merchant. The poor fellow was 
told to remove a huge pile of stones from 
one end of a field to another. When this 
task was completed he was ordered to re- 
place them in their original position. This 

1 



Z PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 

he did somewhat reluctantly, but when his 
employer sent word to have the operation 
repeated a second time and as often as the 
employee chose, the latter promptly and 
firmly rebelled. He did not care to busy 
himself at a useless task. It made him feel 
like a beggar, and this conscious degrada- 
tion was to him a greater evil than hunger. 
And he was right. There is dignity in 
labor only when it is directed to useful 
ends, and the vigor with which a true man 
will prosecute and push his chosen work 
will depend upon his conviction of its ne- 
cessity to the welfare of the world. The 
final cause of labor is an ethical and extra- 
personal one. The immediate stimulus is 
supplied by the physical needs of the indi- 
vidual, and by the requirements of the 
household, but amid the multitudinous in- 
dustries of modern civilization the stagna- 
tion and degradation of character can be 
prevented, and the noblest manhood can 
come to maturity only through the convic- 
tion that the humblest toiler is a public 
benefactor. 

To this wholesome law the pulpit is no 
exception. It is idle to claim for it the 
august dignity of a Divine institution ; for 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 3 

such a claim can be substantiated only by 
the eternal necessity, and the essential ra- 
tionality, of its sphere. It is not enough 
for some men to insist, with whatever 
honesty and emphasis, that God has called 
them to preach ; unless their message com- 
pels an audience, and produces conviction 
of its Divine origin and intrinsic worth, the 
world will look upon its prophets as mis- 
guided enthusiasts. The counsels of God 
are always the embodiment of infinite power, 
wisdom, holiness, and love. They are woven 
into the essential and eternal needs of hu- 
man nature, and of human history. No 
commission can be supposed to bear the 
Divine seal, which does not convey a mes- 
sage which every man needs to hear, and 
which cannot grow obsolete with any con- 
ceivable advance in civilization. Is preach- 
ing such an agency, instituted for definite 
and lofty ends, incapable of being eliminated 
or supplanted while history runs its course ? 
That question confronts us at the very be- 
ginning of our work, and every man should 
settle that debate in his own mind before 
he takes upon himself the holy vows of 
Christian ordination. 

Paul exhorted Timothy to suffer no man 



4 PHILOSOPHY OF PBEACHING. 

to despise him, to maintain his self-respect 
by making full proof of his ministry, even 
as he was not ashamed of the Gospel of 
Christ, among angry Jews and mocking 
Greeks, because he knew it to be the power 
of God unto salvation for all that believed. 
The advice has not become obsolete. It 
was never needed more than now. There 
is no place where decay and loss of power 
so surely *and swiftly follow upon moral 
timidity, or that want of intellectual poise 
which a noble self-respect insures, as the 
pulpit. The preacher, as the herald of 
God, should be the humblest of men ; but 
that humility should inspire him with an 
unusual and sustained boldness when he 
speaks to his fellows, under the profound 
conviction that what he has to say the 
whole world, from prince to beggar, needs 
to hear and heed. 

All this may seem to you commonplace, 
requiring no argument. For years your 
studies and associations have been such as 
to impress upon you the necessity and" the 
dignity of the preacher's vocation. But 
you will soon leave these quiet retreats of 
Christian learning, and you will be sum- 
moned to wrestle with a prosaic world. 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 5 

There are some things which no theologi- 
cal seminary can teach you. There is no 
preparation which can save you from the 
wrench which every man must endure 
when the call for adjustment to his practi- 
cal environment presses upon him. Some 
men never heed that call, and they either 
drift out of the ministry, or they console 
themselves with the doctrine of total de- 
pravity, bewailing the degeneracy of hu- 
man nature which prevents any man from 
having more than a handful of hearers 
unless he be either a heretic or a mounte- 
bank. You must have faith in your mes- 
sage, and you must have faith in men ; and 
if your message fails to command attention, 
the most sensible thing is to conclude that 
you have been lacking in practical skill. 
Never suffer the suspicion to shadow you 
that the message is not adapted to the 
hearer, nor that the Christian preacher is 
gradually becoming crowded out of his 
place. 

That suspicion pervades the air of mod- 
ern life. There are men who will treat 
you with haughty indifference, or with 
condescending civility, simply because you 
are a clergyman. They do not believe in 



6 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

the manliness of your vocation. They will 
rarely come to hear you preach. They 
may take a personal liking to you, and 
they may avail themselves of your services 
at funerals and weddings, but they would 
think more of you if you were a hod-car- 
rier or a bricklayer. They will say it is a 
pity that you became a priest, seeing there 
is so much manly stuff in you. A senti- 
ment like that cannot be argued down. 
You must live it down, and you can live it 
down only as the conviction in you is at 
white heat that your work is the manliest 
under the sun, seeking the highest practi- 
cal ends and securing the most stable re- 
sults. That will give tone and nerve to 
your speech. That will make you impa- 
tient of all rhetorical redundancies and 
pyrotechnics. That will give pungency 
and power to your style. The ingrained 
consciousness that your work is manly, 
will make your pulpit a throne of manli- 
ness, of strong and sturdy utterance, and 
they who once sneered will come to listen 
with respect, and will not go away without 
profit. But even if they do not come, you 
cannot afford to enter upon your work un- 
less you have faith in its essential manli- 
ness, and in its eternal worth. 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 7 

Nor is it simply the non-Christian ele- 
ment of society which discounts the value 
of preaching. The sermon has become the 
butt of universal ridicule. Even ministers 
speak slightingly of it. You will be re- 
minded that if you pray more than five 
minutes you are insufferably tedious, and 
that a sermon of half an hour is as much as 
the average audience will endure. In many 
churches the sermon has been crowded out 
by the service, and has come to be regarded 
as an appendage. In the Roman ritual it 
is altogether overshadowed. The printing 
press is supposed to have made the pulpit 
superfluous, or at least to have seriously 
narrowed the scope of its influence ; and 
there are not a few earnest Christian men 
who raise the question whether some read- 
justment is not called for, whether tl;e 
preacher should not gracefully retire before 
he is forced to withdraw, and is left behind 
like a shattered hulk by the retiring tide. 
May it not be that the preacher was in- 
dispensable while there were no movable 
types, and that with the invention of print- 
ing, and the diffusion of intelligence, his 
importance has ceased? The inquiry is 
not a very logical one, in the face of the 



8 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

fact that during the Middle Ages, when 
there were no printing presses, there was 
very little preaching, and that since the 
days of Gutenberg there has never been so 
much as now. The printed page has not 
made speech obsolete. We do not read let- 
ters to each other in the household, and we 
drop the pen and the telegraph in favor of 
a personal interview, when we are deter- 
mined to secure our end. I have known 
men to cross the continent to procure in- 
formation promptly and at first hand. The 
pen may be mightier than the sword, but 
it is not mightier than the tongue. Things 
are talked about before they are written 
about, and all great movements, such as 
the Reformation, the revival under the 
Wesleys, the anti-slavery campaign, and 
the temperance reform, depend, for their 
inauguration and success, upon the proph- 
ets of fiery speech. There never has been 
an important political campaign when the 
stump did not take precedence of the tri- 
pod. The truth is that the power of speech 
is man's supreme physical endowment, as 
the power of thought makes him the 
crowned and sceptred monarch of the 
universe. 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 9 

The printed page is only an enlarge- 
ment in the sphere of the written manu- 
script; and if the manuscript cannot 
supersede the spoken word, there is no 
reason to suppose that any cheapening 
process of multiplying copies can do it. 
There are things which the types cannot 
reproduce. The recorded sermons of White- 
field do not glow with the fire of his won- 
derful oratory. The discourses of Jonathan 
Edwards fail to disclose the secret of his 
quiet and resistless power. The speeches 
of the greatest orators are read without 
emotion, when the audiences that heard 
them were swept and swayed as by a 
whirlwind. The face of Cicero gave power 
to his words. The concentrated energy of 
Demosthenes carried conviction with his 
argument. The kindling eye, the play of 
emotion on the mobile countenance, the 
curling of the lips, the pointed finger or 
sudden thrust of the hand, the erect and 
quivering frame, the blood mounting to the 
temples, the momentary pause, the rush of 
rapid, eager speech, all that belongs to an 
intense and vital personality, grappling 
with great thoughts, moved by strong pas- 
sions, urged forward to high endeavor, 



10 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 

cannot be transferred to plates of metal 
and traced upon paper. If sublimity con- 
sists in the employment of the simplest 
agents for the attainment of the loftiest 
ends, then there is nothing sublimer than 
hinging the triumph of righteousness in 
the earth upon the energy of human speech. 
The Greeks laughed at the dream. In 
their judgment it was concentrated folly. 
They might have reflected that their great- 
est reformer and philosopher, the peerless 
Socrates, never wrote a line, but left the 
deep impress of his ministry upon their 
intellectual and moral life by the use of 
incisive speech. John the Baptist was only 
a voice, but he was a voice that waked the 
dead. It was by the spoken word that our 
Lord Himself began and completed His won- 
derful career. In that choice they all acted 
rationally and deliberately. It is the spoken 
word that pierces to the core, and secures 
immediate results. There is no disparage- 
ment of the press in this judgment. It has 
a mighty, a noble, a wide, and enlarging 
mission. It is the ally of human speech, 
not its enemy or supplanter. So long as 
language remains the exponent and vehi- 
cle of thought, so long must the lips retain 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 11 

the primacy in its expression and enforce- 
ment. Speech must remain to the end of 
time the chief agency in the dissemination 
of truth, and in the inculcation of right- 
eousness. 

Assuming, then, that you are conscious 
of the dignity and of the vital importance 
of your calling, as an agency whose neces- 
sity is rooted in the moral order of human 
life and history, disclosing the evidence of 
its Divine appointment in the pertinacity 
of its continuance, and in its quiet refusal 
to be shelved by studied neglect, or crowded 
out of place by competing aspirants, it is 
pertinent, before dealing with the specific 
elements which should enter into all preach- 
ing, to inquire : What is the mission of the 
Christian preacher ? What -should be the 
ultimate aim of his endeavor? In what 
vital, organic, permanent relation does his 
vocation stand to the unfolding life of the 
world? The traditional answers to these 
questions have long been familiar to you ; 
but they have dealt more with the construc- 
tion of the single sermon, than with the 
philosophy of preaching. They have not 
brought out distinctly the final cause of all 
preaching, in view of which it is seen to be 



12 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

a rational unity amid all the forms which 
it has assumed, and in whose attainment it 
should find its perpetual inspiration and its 
final reward. 

One large, earnest, aggressive section of 
the Christian Church, whose piety and con- 
secrated zeal are beyond dispute, maintains 
that preaching should not only be evan- 
gelical, but evangelistic. The preacher is 
simply a herald, and the substance of his 
message is the proclamation of the free for- 
giveness of sins, and the heritage of eternal 
life, through the mediation of Jesus Christ. 
In obedience to that gracious assurance, 
men are to repent of their sins and believe 
on Christ. The message of the pulpit is 
mainly to the unconverted, and every new 
disciple is regarded as under immediate and 
incessant obligation to increase the registry 
of converts. To save souls is said to be 
the preacher's business, and the salvation 
of the soul is associated with some definite, 
formal, and public act of confession and 
committal. The preacher, therefore, should 
incessantly urge men to immediate and pro- 
nounced decision. The normal life of the 
Church is assumed to be one of perpetual 
revival, in the restricted sense of that 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 13 

phrase. Under such a theory, preaching 
becomes hortatory. It never passes beyond 
the rudiments of religious instruction. It 
may make use of the Pauline epistles, but 
it cannot move in their deep and broad 
grooves. It is constantly tempted to dis- 
count and discourage thorough and system- 
atic training in Christian intelligence, and 
to make numerical increase the standard 
of ministerial efficiency. It counts the con- 
verts, it neglects to weigh them. Its am- 
munition is speedily exhausted, and it can 
live only by frequent change of place. It 
is ill adapted to long pastorates, which 
demand a wider range of instruction. 

I am not condemning the evangelistic 
school of preachers. They have been an 
immense blessing to Christendom. They 
have had, and have still, a providential 
mission. We do not want less, but more, 
of the evangelistic temper. The revival- 
istic form of preaching is the only one which 
is suited to pagan communities, and with- 
out it no inroads can be made upon the 
ignorant and degraded masses of nominal 
Christendom. It is needed, too, in the 
highest places, where the pride of reason 
and the complacency of self-righteousness 



14 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

resist and resent the claims of the Gospel. 
Its fire should burn in the heart of every 
herald of the cross. No preacher should 
permit himself to lose the power of direct, 
searching, practical appeal, and the ever- 
lasting " Now is the day of salvation " 
should be the undertone and momentum of 
all his speech. But the evangelistic theory 
of preaching is partial. It fails to reach all 
classes, and it cannot long hold those whom 
it does reach. It has no meat for strong 
men. It is too exclusively emotional, deal- 
ing only with the rudiments of religious 
truth. It fails to touch the intellectual 
and social life of man at a thousand points. 
Christianity, as embodying the power and 
wisdom of God, must be comprehensive and 
cosmopolitan. It must have a message for 
all, and it must master all the forces of 
civilization. It cannot neglect the univer- 
sity in order to redeem the hovel. It has 
no choice in the matter, if it be the Word 
of God to man ; and hence, in every age, 
the Church has been the patron of sound 
learning and the founder of schools. There 
must be an educated ministry. There must 
be Christian scholars, experts in historical 
and literary criticism, equipped with all 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 15 

the learning of their day. While therefore 
the evangelist has his place, his methods 
and aims do not exhaust the function of 
preaching, and we must seek for a more 
comprehensive statement of the Christian 
preacher's mission. 

The evangelistic theory of the sermon is 
faulty in another respect. When the aim 
of preaching is regarded as inciting men to 
believe on Christ, that they may be saved, 
a twofold danger is imminent. Salvation 
is apt to be regarded as synonymous with 
future and eternal blessedness, and the re- 
lation of faith to such blessedness assumes 
a mechanical aspect. The eternal destiny 
of a soul is made to hinge upon a single 
formal act or word. The Biblical emphasis 
is on holiness, not on happiness, on a pres- 
ent and progressive purity of life ; and 
faith is the soul's habitual fellowship with 
God in Christ, by whose Spirit renewing 
and sanctifying energy is imparted. The 
evangelistic theory of preaching is really 
sacramentarian at heart. It assumes that 
the cleavage between heaven and hell is 
made by the word spoken and heard ; just 
as the Romanist confines the grace of eter- 
nal redemption to the baptized. It virtu- 



16 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

ally restricts the operation of the Holy 
Spirit within the lines of evangelical 
Christendom, and makes the pulpit the 
throne of eternal judgment. But no one 
has ever ventured to press the logic to its 
inevitable and paralyzing conclusion. The 
universal salvation of all who die in in- 
fancy is an article of Christian faith which 
cannot be made to harmonize with the 
theory that the design of preaching is to 
fix the eternal destiny of souls, to save 
them in the sense of getting them into 
heaven. That article has been adopted by 
the sternest school of Calvinism in our 
day. Granting it to be true, it is plain 
that the ordinary means of grace cannot 
constitute the general and fundamental 
condition of eternal redemption. The great 
majority of the saved are presumed, by the 
theory of infant salvation, to belong to 
those who never in this life heard even the 
name of Jesus Christ. The sweep of re- 
demption is wider than the voice of the 
preacher. He is not the representative of 
God's judicial action. It will not do to 
say that only adults fall under the rule 
that eternal destiny hinges upon receiving 
or rejecting the Gospel, that infants and 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 17 

idiots constitute a gracious and reasonable 
exception; for in that case infanticide 
might be regarded as a virtue ; and besides, 
the exception is so tremendous that it 
hopelessly vitiates the generalization which 
assumes that preaching is the great sifting 
process by which the wheat is separated 
from the chaff. It cannot be the preacher's 
business to people heaven. He does not 
carry the keys of death and of the un- 
derworld upon his girdle. The eternal 
destinies of men are in God's secret and 
unsearchable keeping, and cannot, in con- 
sistency with our faith in the salvation of 
infants, which we regard as Scripturally 
warranted, be supposed to be bound up 
with the work assigned to the preacher of 
the Gospel. Both in its milder and in its 
sterner form, therefore, the evangelistic 
theory of preaching fails to be consistent 
and satisfactory. 

In sharpest contrast with the evangelis- 
tic conception of preaching is what I venture 
to call the evolutional. It assumes that the 
religious life is germinally and potentially 
present in every human soul. It substi- 
tutes culture and development for conver- 
sion. It addresses every man as a son of 



18 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

God and an heir of heaven, and endeavors 
to stir within him the recognition of these 
prerogatives. It makes the sermon a pious 
meditation, a devotional monologue, an 
emotional deliverance. It claims that in 
Christian assemblies, at least, the only true 
function of preaching is the development 
of the religious sentiment, enveloping and 
pervading the community. Men are asleep, 
not dead. They need waking up, not resur- 
rection from a moral grave. This theory 
of the sermon finds its most illustrious ad- 
vocate and exponent in Schleiermacher, and 
in the German pulpit its influence has been 
marked and salutary. It crowded the shal- 
low and lifeless rationalism to the wall, by 
the universal basis for religion which it 
found in human nature, in the sense of abso- 
lute dependence. Maurice, Kingsley, and 
Robertson are notable representatives of the 
same school, and this form of the sermon 
is characteristic of Broad Churchmanship. 
Robertson's frequent thrusts at the Evan- 
gelicals are not due to slight and occasional 
divergencies in doctrinal judgment, but to 
radical difference of method in dealing with 
men. They addressed men as sinners, who 
could be made the sons of God only by 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 19 

a supernatural act of grace ; he regarded 
adoption as a universal act in Christ, the 
indefeasible dignity and heritage of every 
child of Adam, a treasure hidden in the 
field, of whose existence every man should 
be apprized. Thus the burden of the ser- 
mon becomes, " you are saved," not " flee 
from the wrath to come." Whatever judg- 
ment may be passed upon this theory of 
preaching, the earnestness and power of its 
exponents cannot be called in question. 
They have sapped and undermined the 
movement toward Unitarianism. 

The profound and permanent revolution 
inaugurated by Schleiermacher is familiar 
to every student of religious life in Ger- 
many. In his own case the theory of the 
sermon grew out of his theological system, 
so far as he had any. It is difficult to class 
him. He was a pantheist in philosophy, a 
Calvinist in his doctrine of decrees, a 
Universalist in his conception of the scope 
of redemption. The incarnation was the 
historical emergence and expression of a 
universal fact. The mediation of Christ 
involved a universal restoration to holiness. 
The decree of God is one and singular, 
executed in the final and eternal extinc- 



20 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

tion of evil. Effectual calling is universal. 
At the core of the most imbruted soul 
hides and throbs the indestructible germ 
of life, "wrapped about by the sheathings of 
ignorance and sin. To tear off these band- 
ages, and to give that hidden life its oppor- 
tunity of expression and expansion, is the 
business of the preacher. The soul of man 
is religious by creative constitution; it is 
Christian by the redemptive energy of the 
Son of God. Faith is its normal life, 
through the feeling of absolute depend- 
ence, which no amount of scepticism or 
immorality can eradicate. 

With such a philosophical basis, the ser- 
mon could be nothing else than a gentle, 
persuasive appeal to the muffled inner man. 
Nor can it admit any exception. It must 
speak the same language in Pekin as in 
Berlin ; and if it has failed to evangelize 
the capital of German Christendom, its 
moral energy will not suffice to storm the 
citadels of heathenism. It may work well 
with a limited class, but the limitation of 
its efficiency proves that the theory upon 
which it is based does not agree with the 
stubborn facts. Christlieb pronounces it 
an ideal conception, something to be earn- 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 21 

estly and devoutly hoped for and kept in 
view, but he insists that the aggressive and 
missionary vocation of the Church demands 
also the evangelistic form of preaching, with 
its pungent and urgent summons to imme- 
diate repentance. But all men need to hear 
and heed that call. The new birth is a 
universal necessity. The incompleteness 
of Schleiermacher's method lies in the fact 
that his diagnosis of human nature is par- 
tial. He has read only half its testimony. 
He emphasizes dependence, to the neglect 
of obligation. He has interrogated the 
emotions, but not the conscience. He sees 
the universal restlessness and weakness of 
man more vividly than he does his univer- 
sal and wilful wickedness. He does not 
apprehend the exceeding sinfulness of sin. 
The majesty of the moral law does not 
receive adequate recognition at his hands. 
The dependence of man is at once constitu- 
tional and moral ; in its highest form it is 
the equivalent of duty. And duty implies 
the opposite of weakness. It proclaims 
man's dignity and unqualified personal re- 
sponsibility for his moral state ; " I ought " 
means " I can, if I will," and that makes 
the will in man the target of moral assault 



22 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

and appeal. The evolutional or devotional 
theory of preaching overlooks these stern 
facts, and cannot therefore be accepted as 
defining the preacher's vocation. 

Shall we combine the two? Shall we 
say that preaching should be both evange- 
listic and educational, that it should aim at 
conversion and edification? That would 
seem to be the natural conclusion, and it 
is the theory upon which many preachers 
act. They divide their audiences into saints 
and sinners. They address one class in the 
morning, and the second class in the even- 
ing ; and if the evening is stormy, the saints 
get what was intended for the sinners. Or, 
the sermon ends with a twofold application, 
one to believers, and the other to the unre- 
generate. Such a method cannot fail to 
produce mental confusion and distraction. 
The audience is not treated as a unit, and 
no one hearer gets the full force of the mes- 
sage. And, yet, this is unavoidable, if the 
preacher construes his vocation as involv- 
ing, first, the elimination, through the proc- 
lamation of the Gospel, from the mass of 
mankind, of those who are chosen unto 
eternal life ; and second, the training of 
Christian believers in doctrine, character, 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 23 

and active service. No mortal man is com- 
petent to work along these parallel lines 
with, equal and balanced effectiveness. He 
will inevitably gravitate to one extreme, or 
the other, adopting either the hortatory or 
the didactic as his ordinary and favorite 
tone, unless he can combine the two in 
some higher and inclusive method. It is 
evident, too, that under such a working 
theory, the pulpit must be content with a 
comparatively narrow and restricted field. 
It is debarred, by its own act, from influenc- 
ing public opinion and life at a thousand 
vital points, bringing upon it the charge of 
indifference to present and practical evils, 
through its absorption in the invisible and 
the future. A double, or twofold theory 
of preaching discredits itself; for unity is 
the test of philosophical analysis; and a 
theory which makes preaching a separat- 
ing or sifting agency, intent upon the en- 
largement and edification of the Christian 
Church, surrenders the universality of its 
outlook, and proclaims itself to be simply 
an instrument of ecclesiastical proselytism. 
And for myself, I want both unity in the 
philosophy, and universality in the out- 
look. 



II. 



In the preceding lecture the question 
was raised : What is the ultimate aim of 
preaching, the single and comprehensive 
practical purpose which the preacher should 
have in mind, in all his studies, in the 
preparation and in the delivery of every 
sermon ? Sermons have been divided into 
textual and topical; into expository, doc- 
trinal, experimental, and practical; into 
hortatory and didactic ; but these divisions 
are in order only when the germinal idea 
of the sermon has been clearly thrown into 
conscious relief. There is something in 
the true sermon which distinguishes it 
from every other form of public speech. 
Nor is that distinction due simply to the 
contents. The form is hardly less impor- 
tant than the matter, and form is largely 
determined by the presence or the absence 
of deliberate intention. Each sermon will 
24 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 25 

have its specific intention, but all the ser- 
mons of a year, and of a lifetime, are prop- 
erly an orderly and progressive unity ; in 
which, to use the phraseology of Herbert 
Spencer, the integration keeps pace with 
the differentiation. The sermon has its 
definite place and purpose, and to these it 
should be held as rigidly as the planets are 
held by the force of gravity. 

Nor does the preacher stand alone. He 
belongs to a great, living army, whose num- 
bers must keep step together, and move 
along many widely separated lines, and by 
many different paths, towards a common 
goal. There is not one law for the metrop- 
olis, and another for the frontier settlement ; 
one law for nominally Christian commun- 
ions, and another for pagan populations. 
Consciously or unconsciously, intentionally 
or otherwise, the preaching of any age is a 
vital and vitalizing unity, a definite force 
designed, in the Divine plan, to produce a 
definite result. 

The generations, too, are interlocked. 
There is such a thing as an integration of 
dispensations, an evolution of history, which 
is but another name for the march of God's 
redemptive thought. In this evolution and 



26 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

march preaching has its appointed place ; 
and though, for purposes of literary criti- 
cism, we may distinguish between modern, 
and mediaeval, and apostolic, and prophetic, 
and ante-diluvian preaching, the classifica- 
tion must proceed upon a principle which 
introduces unity into the diversity. The 
preaching of Noah was very different from 
that of Paul, both in form and in substance, 
in point of time and range of thought ; but 
so far as both preached, there must have 
been identity in the Divine intention. 
Preaching is like a wide-branching oak 
or elm, whose every twig and leaf are 
nourished and colored by the sap which 
flows from the tap-root. It is not a dis- 
tinctively Christian agency. It had a re- 
markable history in the eighth and succeed- 
ing centuries before Christ, whose records 
are preserved for us in the prophetic books 
of the Scriptures, and whose mighty influ- 
ence upon subsequent Jewish life is not 
even yet adequately understood. It was 
prominent and powerful in the days of 
Samuel, in whom again we discover only a 
revival of the spirit of Moses. The prophet 
was the true oracle of the theocracy ; its initi- 
ating, conserving, guiding force. Not upon 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 27 

Aaron, but upon Moses, rested the common- 
wealth of Israel. By the hands of a prophet 
the Decalogue was given, and by prophets 
the will of God was made known. Tem- 
ple and sacrifice belonged to the vanishing 
form of the dispensation, but the prophet 
was master of a universal tongue, and his 
speech is as pungent and piercing as ever. 
Preaching has only become more frequent 
and widely diffused, with a larger store of 
truth at its command; but though the 
stream has deepened and widened, the 
pulse and push of the fountain-head remain 
unchanged. And if we want to know what 
the preacher's definite vocation is, we can- 
not afford to neglect inquiring into the 
philosophy of prophecy; for prophecy con- 
stitutes the vital bond between the Mosaic 
and Christian dispensations. The priest 
has gone, the prophet remains; first in 
appearance, perpetual in his ministry. 

Advancing, then, from negative criticism 
to positive statement, let me begin by say- 
ing that, in my judgment, no better and 
more helpful definition of the preacher's 
vocation has been given, in recent years, 
than the one to which the first incumbent 
of this lectureship gave expression, sup- 



28 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

porting it by an appeal to the words 
of Paul in his Epistle to the Ephe- 
sians. " Reconstructed Manhood" was the 
vivid phrase into which he packed his 
theory of the sermon ; and if we may pre- 
sume that he entertained no individualistic 
restriction, but had in mind a reconstructed 
humanity or human society, a redeemed 
race of mortal men and women on earth, 
the definition may be accepted as complete 
and comprehensive. It certainly supplies 
the preacher with something definite and 
tangible. It makes him deal with men as 
they are, as needing moral reconstruction, 
and it urges him to look for immediate and 
practical results in life and conduct. The 
Gospel becomes a living message to living 
men. Salvation means a present manhood 
after the ideal in Christ, through the in- 
strumentality of Divine truth and by the 
agency of the Holy Spirit ; not a boon to 
be secured at death. It is the man in his 
mortal body with whom the preacher wres- 
tles, instead of fixing his thoughts upon 
the disembodied spirit. The heaven into 
which he urges men is the reign of right- 
eousness on earth ; the hell from which 
he would pluck them, as brands from the 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 29 

burning, is the hell of greed and lust, 
of brutal passion and degraded life. He 
makes holiness urgent now and always. 
He insists upon an immediate and radical 
repentance, a change of conviction issuing 
in a new creation, whose order and beauty 
transfigure a prosaic and busy world. 
Eternity is to make time radiant by the 
triumph of righteousness in all lands. All 
powers of body and soul, all achievements 
of industry, learning and art, the life of 
home and the policies of nations, are to 
answer with joyful alacrity the touch of 
Christ's pierced hands. 

Cicero said of Socrates that "he caused 
philosophy to descend from heaven to 
earth, to enter into the cities and homes 
of men," by his conception of wisdom as 
dealing with the principles and the prac- 
tice of personal and political virtue. It 
was a great and fruitful revolution in the 
method and aim of speculative thought. 
And the theory of preaching which con- 
centrates all its attention upon the recon- 
struction of human society, urging indi- 
vidual repentance and regeneration with 
a view to pervasive and universal moral 
rectitude, brings the pulpit into living 



30 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

touch with all that concerns human weal. 
It answers the severe tests of unity and 
universality, without which no philosophy 
can establish its claim to truth. It has the 
same message for every man, in every age 
and in every clime. It invests the present 
life, and the march of history, with a sig- 
nificance which the probationary theory of 
our present existence does not, and cannot, 
give to it. It makes the ethical the real 
eternal ; and bids us look for the golden 
streets, and the gates of pearl, and the 
walls of jasper, as the glory of a city which 
is to descend out of heaven, to become the 
capital of an earthly empire. It looks upon 
literature and art, upon commerce and gov- 
ernment, as subject to the authority which 
it represents, and as destined to become its 
powerful allies. It claims all human life 
as its own, to be purified, sweetened, en- 
larged by its Divine ministry. It preaches 
the same old Gospel, but it makes the 
message intensely urgent and practical. It 
demands not only decision, but obedience, a 
faith whose fruit is abundant and precious. 
It does not save here that it may reap here- 
after. It wants to fill the garners of earth 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 31 

to overflowing, that God may be honored 
and men may be blessed. 

It is true that preaching has never been 
able wholly to ignore the importance of the 
present, earthly life, and has always insisted 
that true religion encourages and urges to 
true morality. But the emphasis has been 
oftener, and more generally, upon future 
destiny than upon present character. The 
old formula, that out of the Church there 
is no salvation, meant that the gates of 
heaven opened only at the bidding of the 
priest. And the Protestant tests of faith 
and repentance, or of an experimental 
knowledge of Christ's saving power, have 
been regarded in the same way, as evi- 
dences here of what their professors shall 
secure hereafter. Hence the charges and 
countercharges of Romanist and Protestant, 
that religion and morality, piety and purity, 
have been sundered or united by artificial 
bonds. Hence the charge so frequently 
made that popular and traditional Christi- 
anity makes virtuous conduct of no prac- 
tical account, by its doctrines of priestly 
absolution or of saving faith ; and that in 
this matter Luther is as great a sinner as 
Tetzel, as in either case it is the state after 



32 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

death which absorbs attention. For my- 
self, I must frankly confess that the grave 
charge has only too much truth in it ; and 
that there is but little relief in urging that 
an assured hope of heaven cannot fail to 
make a man pure. The sad facts do not 
bear out the statement; for the greatest 
scandals have come from men who have 
been loudest in affirming the assurance of 
salvation ; and besides, it does not, to say 
the least, seem to be a very high morality 
which cultivates decency in behavior under 
the pressure of future reward. There is 
certainly much to commend a theory of 
the preacher's vocation, which compels an 
emphasis upon present character, and which 
deals with the hereafter only incidentally 
and by implication. I am not sure but it 
would be wise to give to the doctrine of an 
earthly probation a different theological 
turn ; so that, instead of saying that every 
man's eternal destiny is determined at 
death, we should affirm that the preacher's 
vocation deals directly only with the life 
on this side of the grave. Let him do his 
utmost to make the life of God, and the 
grace of Jesus Christ, real in the men and 
women to whom he speaks and among 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 33 

whom he lives, and he may encourage 
them to be fearless of that future whose 
secrets are pierced only by the eyes of om- 
niscience. It may seem as if the idea of 
reconstructed manhood, or of a redeemed 
human society on earth, is a serious nar- 
rowing of the preacher's vocation, but it 
has the advantage of a clearly outlined 
task, in whose performance he touches all 
men in the use of all their faculties. And 
if it should appear that this conception 
pervades the Scriptures, and constitutes the 
unvarying undertone of its most impres- 
sive appeals, woven into its history, color- 
ing alike its precepts and its promises, 
breathed in its prayers and its praises, 
stirring in its prophecies and pealing in its 
judgments, it will be the part of wisdom 
to bring ourselves into close and loving 
adjustment with the methods and aims of 
those who spake as they were moved by 
the Holy Ghost. 

Now, the very structure of the Bible is 
such as to suggest that preaching was de- 
signed to be a historical agency for the 
moral training of the race, instead of a 
means for the determination of personal, 
eternal destiny. Upon the latter assump- 



34 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

tion, the long delay in the advent of Christ, 
and the acknowledged imperfection of all 
preceding revelation, constitute a most se- 
rious embarrassment in any attempted vin- 
dication of the impartial justice and love 
of God. It may be defended on the plea 
of the Divine sovereignty, as unconditional 
and inscrutable ; but such a logical proce- 
dure is too summary for Christian intelli- 
gence. I am not surprised that modern 
theodicies, starting with the assumption 
that the Gospel is to be preached among 
all nations in order that the elect may be 
gathered into heaven, are pushed to the 
conclusion that the gracious proclamation 
must be continued through the intermedi- 
ate state, in order that every soul may have 
its equal and full opportunity for intelligent 
and deliberate action. The vice in the 
logic is in the major premise, for which I 
have failed to find any support in the Word 
of God. Preaching appears, throughout 
the inspired pages, as a historical agency, 
widening in its scope, increasing in the in- 
tensity of its power, accumulating its stores 
of truth, designed and fitted to produce a 
historical result. 

The Bible is the most living of all books. 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 35 

Every chapter and paragraph, every psalm 
and prayer and prophecy, bears the birth- 
mark of some great and earnest soul. It is 
the fragmentary record of sixteen centuries, 
more correctly of forty-one centuries of Di- 
vine education ; starting with the promise 
of the serpent-bruiser, and crowned by the 
sublime Gospel from the pen of John. If 
its creation was a vital, historical evolution, 
what can its mission be, now that it is 
winged and fully equipped for its task, but 
a historical leavening of the life of human- 
ity which shall be commensurate with the 
long story of its production? An instru- 
ment which was forged and shaped in the 
fires and on the anvils of four thousand 
years, while cities were built, and wars 
were waged, and empires vanished, and 
great literatures were created, all of them 
meanwhile preparing the opportunity of 
its use, and opening a path for the display of 
its power, must have for its immediate aim 
a subjugation and transfiguration of terres- 
trial life, whose sublime grandeur no fancy 
can sketch, and which can find expression 
only in the extraordinary imagery of the 
Apocalypse. The dream of Babylon's fa- 
mous king is involuntarily recalled, where 



36 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

the huge image of gold, silver, brass, iron, 
and clay, representing the march of political 
history, is smitten by the stone, hurled of 
unseen hands, grinding the image into pow- 
der, and covering the whole earth. Such an 
issue, the universal reign of righteousness 
on earth, makes luminous the long and 
severe educational process which culmi- 
nated in the advent of Jesus Christ, and 
in the apostolic ministry. 

A second corroborative proof that preach- 
ing is a divinely appointed agency for the 
accomplishment of a historical result, is 
found in the comparative silence of Holy 
Scripture on the life beyond the grave. I 
say comparative silence, because personal 
immortality is involved, by necessary impli- 
cation, in its doctrine of what God is, and 
in its description of His relation to man as 
created in His image, and summoned to in- 
timate and confidential fellowship with Him. 
But the future life is not the great burden 
of its revelation. There is no explicit af- 
firmation of it in the Pentateuch. Only 
once does its hope burst from the lips of 
Job, and even then the meaning of his 
words is not perfectly clear. In the lofti- 
est psalms it finds only vague expression. 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 37 

The prophets maintain the same strange 
reserve. All through the Old Testament, 
Hades is the underworld shrouded in im- 
penetrable gloom; and the disembodied 
state is not regarded as an abode of rest, 
nor as the transfer to a higher sphere. 
Not until we reach the New Testament and 
read the story of our Lord's resurrection do 
we come to clear visions of the future. The 
gloom vanishes ; the ancient silent faith 
speaks out in jubilant tones, that to have 
died and so to be with Christ is far better. 
But even here the revelation is scanty, and 
leaves a thousand questions unanswered. 
Uninterrupted personal identity, and an 
advance in blessedness, we may confidently 
affirm for all who die in the Lord; but even 
for them there is something lacking until 
Christ shall come at the end of the world ; 
while the state of the impenitent dead is 
veiled in startling imagery, whose exact 
import we cannot determine. 

There is certainly something very sug- 
gestive and impressive in this silence and 
in these scanty references. If they do not 
form the staple of revelation, they certainty 
cannot properly be the burden of our preach- 
ing. The field surveyed is the earth, human 



38 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

life in its present moral conditions, capaci- 
ties, and obligations. It is altogether an in- 
adequate statement of the case to say that 
the Bible represents the present earthly 
life as the only period of moral probation. 
It does more than that. It deals with the 
future life only by indirection, as a corol- 
lary or implication at most, while the per- 
vading or overshadowing emphasis is on 
the life that now is. The Old Testament 
thought moves, almost exclusively, within 
the limits of temporal rewards and punish- 
ments, the present blessedness of the man 
of God, and the shame which shall surely 
come over the wicked; while in the New 
Testament precept and promise bear a pre- 
ponderant relation to present godliness. 
Our current methods invert all this. We 
labor for revivals, we pray for the baptism 
of the Holy Ghost, we urge men to come 
to Christ, with our thoughts fixed upon 
the grave, and upon the word of hope that 
may be spoken over the man when he is 
gone. We believe that this world is a lost 
world, and yet its condemnation and ruin 
are practically viewed as in suspense, pro- 
spective calamities to be avoided and escaped 
by fleeing to Christ as the appointed refuge 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 39 

from the coming wrath. And so we teach 
and sing : 

" While the lamp holds out to burn, 
The vilest sinner may return." 

We do not mean to place a premium 
upon deathbed repentances, we do not mean 
to encourage dissoluteness of life ; but the 
moral imperative, demanding immediate 
and obedient recognition, is shorn of its 
majestic might by the undertone of an 
appeal to prudential motives. Salvation is 
made an affair of commercial barter, where 
men pay a certain price and secure a fut- 
ure gain. If prudential considerations 
must play a part in securing repentance, 
ought we not to adopt the prophetic and 
apostolic method, in which the judgment 
of God is represented as in actual and fear- 
ful execution upon all who repress the 
truth in unrighteousness ? It is a personal, 
earthly, historical judgment which Paul so 
tersely outlines in his first chapter of the 
Epistle to the Romans. The current pa- 
gan life, with its universal license, with its 
unnatural crimes, with its degradation of 
the home, with its political cruelty, law- 
lessness, and insecurity, was a revelation 



40 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

of the Divine indignation, whose righteous 
fury would smite men more and more se- 
verely, unless they repented and ceased 
doing evil. The epistles are full of the 
homeliest instructions and appeals, many 
of which are disguised in our translation, 
and which we should hardly dare to repro- 
duce in their original plainness, all of them 
bearing upon the necessity of an immediate 
and radical change in the existing life. 
The universal emphasis is on present char- 
acter and condition, and a revival of bib- 
lical preaching must deal boldly, almost 
exclusively, with the mortal life of men. 
Sin brings present disgrace and ruin to 
body and soul, to home and country ; it 
breeds distrust, it enervates manhood and 
womanhood, it incites to murderous re- 
venge, it arrays class against class, it 
kindles the volcanic fire of social hate, it 
is a menace to domestic peace, to social 
order, and to international amity ; and from 
all this there is salvation only by that per- 
sonal integrity and social righteousness 
which are the free gift of God to men by 
faith in Jesus Christ. Is not that the bur- 
den of Old Testament prophecy ? Is it not 
the kernel of the Pauline logic, when by 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 41 

an argument purely historical in his great 
epistle, he shows that the Gospel alone is 
competent to do what the wisdom of the 
Greek, and the law of Moses, had failed 
to accomplish? The pierced hands alone 
can rescue the world out of that abyss 
of woe into whose fathomless depths sin 
is hurling it with an ever accelerated ac- 
tivity. Here is your task and mine, as it 
was that of prophets and apostles before 
us, to make this earth the abode of purity 
and the paradise of God. 

Look once more into your Bibles, and 
note that central phrase around which all 
its practical admonitions cluster and re- 
volve, as planets around the sun. In the 
earliest biography of our Lord's life and 
ministry, Ave are told that Jesus "came into 
Galilee preaching the Gospel of the king- 
dom of God, and saying, The time is ful- 
filled, and the kingdom of God is at hand, 
repent ye, and believe the Gospel." What 
was the Gospel? It was the glad tidings 
that "the kingdom of God" was at hand; 
and men were urged to change their minds 
and believe the announcement. They were 
summoned to abandon their dream of polit- 
ical rule, and to accept citizenship in that 



42 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

moral empire, whose laws He expounded, 
and of which. He claimed to be King. That 
was the burden of His personal ministry, as 
it had been that of His forerunner. Around 
that conception of a Divine kingdom, Mat- 
thew weaves the materials of his Gospel. 
Christ is a King, the Founder of a new and 
universal theocracy. The Sermon on the 
Mount holds the same place in Matthew's 
sketch, Avhich the book of the law has in 
the Pentateuch. It expounds the condi- 
tions and the duties of citizenship in the 
new commonwealth. The parables illus- 
trate its nature, its purifying power, its 
expanding energy, and its sifting processes. 
The forty days between the resurrection 
and the ascension were devoted to instruc- 
tions " pertaining to the kingdom of God," 
and the book of Acts ends with the state- 
ment that Paul, upon his arrival at Rome, 
gathered the chief of the Jews together, 
and expounded to them, by an appeal to 
Moses and the prophets, the doctrine of 
Christ, and of "the kingdom of God." 

It was not a new phrase upon the lips of 
the Baptist; it had been the watchword of 
patience, and of hope, through many weary 
centuries. It was the keynote of prophetic 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 43 

warning and encouragement, and it meant 
the rule of God in all the earth, the house 
of the Lord becoming the resort of worship 
for all nations. The blessing of the cove- 
nant was to be the heritage of all races and 
lands. Against the carnal and political 
methods by which that sovereignty was 
hoped to be secured, our Lord most ear- 
nestly protested ; but he mustered his disci- 
ples under the same banner, and summoned 
them to the same work, when He taught 
them to pray, " Thy kingdom come. Thy 
will be done in earth as it is in heaven,' ? 
petitions which are also promises and proph- 
ecies. And hence it was that the apostolic 
emphasis, in preaching and in epistle, was 
ever upon the return of Jesus Christ in 
power and in glory. It was not death, but 
the second advent, upon which the disciples 
fixed their gaze. They were busy prepar- 
ing the way for the King, watching for 
Him with trimmed and burning lamps. 
They were understood by many to teach 
that the final coming was near at hand, and 
the Church fell into chiliastic dreams, from 
which she was rudely awakened by the 
barbarian invasion and the fall of Rome. 
That opened for her the path to a new 



44 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

dominion, and inspired her with the ambi- 
tion of universal empire, in securing and 
consolidating which she freely employed 
the methods of political intrigue, and the 
agency of the sword. She grasped the 
crown, and burnt her preachers. Luther's 
hammer wrecked the ambitious project, and 
the last remnants of ecclesiastical despot- 
ism are vanishing. The Pope is a prisoner 
in his own palace, a stranger in his own 
city, and at any moment he may be 
an involuntary exile. Rome's idea of the 
kingdom of God has proved to be as base- 
less as the earlier fancies. And yet, that 
kingdom is the practical theme of revela- 
tion, the keynote of all dispensations. It is 
not of the world, and yet it is to conquer 
the world. It is not to come with obser- 
vation, heralded by startling phenomena, 
shaking thrones and convulsing nations, 
and yet its advent is to be with irresistible 
might. It is righteousness, and peace, and 
joy, in the Holy Ghost. That is the ad- 
vent upon which the gaze of every disci- 
ple is to be fixed, and whose hastening 
should enlist the preacher's zeal. 

In a word, the historical triumph of Chris- 
tianity is the immediate and practical result 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 45 

designed to be attained by the preaching of 
the Gospel. We make the world's evan- 
gelization, the discipling of all nations, in- 
cidental and subordinate ; it is, in reality, 
supreme and exclusive. The present pro- 
saic earth is the territory which we are 
summoned to subdue to the obedience of 
Jesus Christ. Here, where sin threw down 
the gauge of battle and made man an exile 
from Paradise, the conflict is to be fought 
out to its bitter end, until Eden comes back 
with a fairer and a perennial beauty. What 
socialism blindly aims at through revolu- 
tionary and anarchial measures, Chris- 
tianity is fitted and destined to accomplish 
for man. The cry of the poor is to be 
answered. Every burden is to be loosed, 
every yoke of oppression is to be broken. 
Ignorance is to be supplanted by the wis- 
dom whose beginning is the fear of the 
Lord. Drunkenness is to be exterminated, 
and Sabbath desecration is to cease. The 
monster of lust is to be cast into the bottom- 
less pit. The meek are to inherit the earth. 
The idolatries and cruelties of Paganism 
are to be swept away. And all this is to 
be done, not by repressive and punitive 
legislation, but by the expansive and con- 



46 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

quering energy of the Holy Spirit, enter- 
ing into individual souls, through faith in 
Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the Gospel. 
That is only a means to an end, an epi- 
sode in a larger history. Beyond it lie the 
day of judgment and the eternal years, 
with their unfolding story which God has 
reserved to Himself. The philosophy of 
mortal history is all that has been disclosed 
to us, and that we have been slow to mas- 
ter. We have been more curious than con- 
secrated. Whatever mighty results the 
volume of the future may contain, the 
introductory chapter concerns the present 
conquest of. humanity to righteousness, 
until the wilderness shall blossom as the 
rose, and the lion and the lamb shall lie 
down in peace together. Earth is the 
battle ground of the eternities, and moral 
forces are to determine the issue of the 
encounter. 

This conception makes the Christian 
pulpit a living, burning, perpetual need. 
The vocation of the preacher is seen to 
stand in organic relation to the develop- 
ment of human history. He blazes the 
way to the appointed goal, and marshals 
the growing and victorious battalions along 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 47 

the widening highway. This is the vision 
of prophets and apostles, of Daniel in idola- 
trous Babylon, and of John in the isle of 
Patmos. The kingdoms of this world are 
to become the kingdom of our God, and of 
His Christ, and He is to reign forever and 
ever. It requires no ordinary faith to be- 
lieve this. It demands no ordinary courage 
to confess it in the face of doubt and denial. 
It seems chimerical. The pessimistic esti- 
mate of the world's future is more congenial 
to the reigning temper. It is so much easier 
to wait for a catastrophe, than to convert 
the world by the foolishness of preaching. 
We get weary of the strain, and long for 
the descending fire, the advent of our Lord. 
But He is here. His banners are unfurled, 
and He bids us unite with the Sword of the 
Spirit, which is the Word of God. This, 
then, I conceive to be the Scriptural theory 
of the Christian preacher's vocation, the 
Divine philosophy of his commission, the 
reconstruction of humanity, the historical 
triumph of Christianity in all the earth. 

I am aware that such an interpretation 
of the final cause of preaching will seem, 
at first inspection, to divest it of any special 
Divine significance, and to reduce it to a 



48 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

very ordinary agency for securing moral 
improvement. The peculiar idea of re- 
demption seems to be eliminated, and the 
immortality of the soul appears to be re- 
duced to an inference, which might as well 
be explicitly ignored. But neither of these 
inferences is logically involved in the doc- 
trine here propounded and defended. The 
matter of preaching remains exactly the 
same, in its essential basis, and in the logi- 
cal order of its separate doctrines. The 
supernatural revelation of God for the 
redemption of man, culminating in the per- 
son and mediation of our Lord, and con- 
tinued through the personal ministry of 
the Holy Spirit, is assumed and most ear- 
nestly maintained. The profound biblical 
conceptions of sin, and law, and atonement, 
and regeneration, are not divested of their 
supernatural import, and relegated to the 
vocabulary of natural ethics. I am not 
pleading for another Gospel, nor for a new 
and attenuated version of the old Gospel, 
but for such a use of it as shall deal with 
man as he is, and shall secure his present 
redemption from the power and pollution 
of sin. Use the same rifle, powder, and ball, 
but aim low. I have no confidence in the 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 49 

preaching which confines itself to the expo- 
sition of ethical maxims, which urges men 
to avoid falsehood and vice on the ground 
of the constitutional dignity of human 
nature, which does not introduce the mo- 
tives growing out of a veritable Divine 
intervention, and which ignores the sanc- 
tions of the Divine judgment ; for upon 
such a view, Socrates and Confucius are 
older, and so far, better authorities than 
Jesus Christ. For all literature has its 
tragic undertone, and the altar is every- 
where the confession of sin, and a memorial 
of fear. Man needs Divine redemption. 
Something must be clone for him. Hu- 
manity must be rescued by the hand of 
God, as well as startled by His voice and 
welcomed to His heart. It must be born 
from above. Its prison doors mast be 
broken, its manacles must be melted, the 
tide of death must be checked and reversed 
in the prisoner's veins. Reformation will 
not answer ; it only administers anodynes, 
whose only effect is to retard for a season 
the inevitable collapse. Socrates did not 
save Greece ; the Stoics did not save Rome ; 
Confucius and Sakya-Mouni have not saved 
China and India. Ethical injunctions will 



50 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

not save man; the experiment has been 
widely tried, and it has always been a sad 
and conspicuous failure. Humanity needs 
a Redeemer, an historical and personal 
descent of the living God into the stream 
of its poisoned life, if that life is to be 
cleansed and sweetened. And this is the 
burden of the Gospel, that God was in 
Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. 
That was more than a republication of the 
moral law. It was more than the revela- 
tion of God's universal Fatherhood. Love 
wins and conquers by what it does, not by 
what it says, and the glad tidings of the 
New Testament are in what Jesus Christ did 
for men, and in the abiding energy of that 
work. The pierced hands are no myth, 
the broken heart is no accident, the open 
grave is no poetic fancy. They reveal 
much ; they have achieved, and are achiev- 
ing more. The air is not more indispensa- 
ble to physical life than is Jesus Christ to 
man's redemption. My aim has been to set 
forth the tremendous realism of the eternal 
priesthood of Jesus Christ, its profound 
historical necessity, and its design as a his- 
torical fact, to produce a definite historical 
result, — the redemption of man. 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 51 

Nor, under this conception of the preach- 
er's vocation, is man to be treated as the crea- 
ture of time. That would be an irrational 
procedure, for the simple reason that man's 
spirit bears the image of God, and is there- 
fore immortal in its essential constitution. 
You must address him as the child and heir 
of eternity; only you need to remember 
that the eternity which thus crowns him is 
not prospective merely, but present. All 
that he does and is has eternal significance. 
It is unending in duration of effect, because 
it is eternal in present quality. It is an 
unscriptural distinction which limits time 
to the present and eternity to the future. 
The present moment is all that has reality, 
and time and eternity are only different 
faces of the NOW. " The things that are 
seen are temporal, the things that are not 
seen are eternal," says the great apostle. 
And everywhere, at every moment, the 
seen and the unseen confront us. They 
meet in our composite personality ; the vis- 
ible body is temporal, the invisible soul is 
eternal. They balance and interpenetrate 
each other in what we call the universe ; 
so far as it is visible, it is temporal and 
changing, but its invisible energy, as rooted 



52 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

in the will of the Living God, is immutable, 
constant, eternal. That is the Pauline dis- 
tinction, and it embodies the profoundest 
philosophy. He does not say that the vis- 
ible is unreal, nor does he say that the in- 
visible is ideal; he is neither an idealist 
nor a materialist. The visible and the in- 
visible are equally real : Paul speaks as a 
natural dualist. But the invisible is the 
root of the visible. It is the immutable, 
constant, eternal principle of the changing 
and transient. Wherever the invisible is, 
there is the eternal : and if there be an 
omnipresent, invisible God, eternity is con- 
densed into every flying minute. Every 
conscious, responsible soul holds the awful 
secret in its grasp. In virtue of its consti- 
tutional relationship to God, and in virtue 
of its natural sonship, its present attitude 
and action are invested with eternal signi- 
ficance. Immortality is not eliminated, but 
it is traced to its living root, in the invisible 
spirit, and eternity shows its majestic face 
behind the thin veil of time. 

The truth is that our philosophy of mor- 
tal life has been altogether too meagre. 
Our estimate of history has been singularly 
inadequate. We have been disposed to 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 53 

regard the present life as full only of 
vanity, as indeed it is to him who uses 
it mainly for eating, drinking, getting rich 
and being merry. We have rattled the 
skeleton in men's faces. We have taken 
our practical theology from Ecclesiastes, 
instead of from the Gospel of John. But 
now is the accepted time, now is the day of 
salvation. The air is full of sunshine and 
song. The last days are upon us, in which 
God has spoken to us by His Son, and set 
up His tabernacle among men. The future 
has no dignity which does not fill each 
passing hour, and eternity is the pulse, the 
throbbing heart, of time. And, therefore, 
the present life is not a temporary scaffold- 
ing, a period of moral probation, but the 
deep and broad foundation which God is 
laying by human hands for the temple of 
His building ; and the history, slowly syl- 
labling itself in the world's redemption, is 
the first and formative chapter in the glo- 
rious records of the future. Present life 
alicl present history are eternal, of intrin- 
sic and imperishable worth. To save men, 
then, in their mortal bodies, and to sub- 
due the earth unto righteousness, through 
the preaching of the Gospel, is to give to 



54 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 

eternity its living place in the annals of 
time. 

For more than ten years I have rested in 
this conclusion, and each review has only 
confirmed my confidence in its correctness. 
It has given me poise and gladness amid 
the eschatological discussions which have 
disturbed our theological schools, and 
which have marred the peace of our mis- 
sionary gatherings. I have felt that I had 
other work to do than to frame theories as 
to how God would deal with those who 
have never heard the Gospel. I do not 
know what He will do with those who 
hear the Gospel from my lips. The rejec- 
tion of my message may not involve their 
eternal perdition, I am not the organ of 
God's retributive justice, and I would not 
be for ten thousand worlds. The inter- 
mediate state is a terra incognita, on which 
I have ceased to speculate, simply because 
human reason is incompetent to conduct 
the debate to any certain issue, and because 
the Scriptures have not been made the ve- 
hicle of any revelation on the subject. 
The dead are in God's hands, where we 
should be both content and glad to leave 
them; the living millions are on your 



PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 55 

hands and mine, and the)' should burden 
our hearts. Surely, on this ground we can 
clasp hands, and push to the utmost the 
energies of Christian activity, until their 
widening lines shall compass all the na- 
tions. Until then, the Christian pulpit 
must remain as the mightiest of conserva- 
tive moral forces, and as the most potent 
of all aggressive regenerating agencies. 

It seems to me that this theory of preach- 
ing unites the evangelistic and evolutional 
conceptions in a higher, single, comprehen- 
sive formula. It agrees with the evange- 
listic in recognizing this world as a lost 
world, as dead in trespasses and sins, as 
exposed to imminent and eternal judgment, 
as summoned in these last days to immedi- 
ate repentance, and requiring that renewing 
and sanctifying energy of the Holy Spirit, 
which is connected with an obedient faith 
in the Gospel, for its rescue. It does not 
ignore the individual in the universality 
of its outlook. It accentuates personal 
responsibility. It paints sin in the darkest 
colors. It maintains the majesty of moral 
law. It knows only Christ and Him cruci- 
fied, as the sinner's hope of pardon and 
purity. It addresses each man as an im- 



56 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

mortal being, and invests every moral 
choice with eternal significance. It does 
not soothe with unfounded hopes. It urges 
to immediate and decided action. On the 
other hand, it agrees with the evolutional 
or educational theory of the sermon by 
recognizing that the Incarnation was a 
historical crisis, that the Resurrection was 
a historical victory, and that the Mediato- 
rial Reign of Jesus Christ is a historical 
process. The present life of man is to be 
sanctified and sweetened, and the whole 
earth is to be made the abode of piety and 
peace. That eternal issues are involved 
in the process, no thoughtful man, who 
reverently reads his Bible, can for a mo- 
ment doubt, and must be assumed on the 
ground of the soul's indestructible being 
and the absolute authority of moral law; 
nor can these considerations be eliminated 
from the message which the pulpit must 
deliver ; but the immediate object of attain- 
ment must be the present conversion of men 
to holiness of life, by faith in Jesus Christ. 
This will give living unity to the sermon, 
and cannot fail to impress the 1 preacher 
with a profound conviction of the historical 
necessity and importance of his vocation. 



THE PEKSONAL ELEMENT IN 
PREACHING. 

" Know thyself," was the short, pithy 
sentence into which the best Greek thought 
compressed its practical wisdom. This 
constitutes the problem of a sound philoso- 
phy, and it is indispensable to genuine 
oratorical power. For it is not the word 
which holds the subtle, conquering energy, 
but the thought which the word aims to 
carry, and thought comes with its mightiest 
force only when the soul is stirred to its 
profoundest depths, is roused in the com- 
pass of all its powers, and thrusts itself 
forward with eager and hastening step. 
Language is only the vehicle of thought, 
and thought is the mind in conscious ac- 
tion. If words are to burn their way, 
thought must be at white heat, and the 
soul must be on fire. We preach to per- 
suade men, and the secret of persuasion is 

57 



58 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

the impact of soul upon soul, in which 
obscurity is overcome by clearness, and 
doubt by faith, and narrowness by breadth, 
and fancies by facts, and partiality by com- 
prehension, and hesitation by decision. 
As a rule, audiences are more responsive 
than sympathetic. Often they are cold 
and critical, if not positively hostile. 
When at their best, they wait to be moved, 
and they can be powerfully and perma- 
nently moved only by words that convey 
strong personal conviction, and provoke 
an instant affirmative response. Whether 
we like it or not, whether we justify the 
attitude, or condemn it, the hearer need 
not be expected to surrender in advance. 
Preaching is always an athletic contest, a 
close grappling and serious wrestle, and 
whether the result shall be conquest, or 
defeat, or a drawn battle, will depend upon 
the perfect command the preacher has of 
his thoughts and of himself. The sword 
must grow to his hands, must be double- 
edged, and he must be master in its use. 
The soul in you must make the souls of 
your hearers captive. You must speak 
with authority ; not the authority of self- 
conceit, nor that of paraded learning, nor 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT, 59 

that of ecclesiastical decisions, but the 
authority which accompanies personal cer- 
titude. 

This is the only personal element which 
has any legitimate place in the theory 
of preaching, and without it preaching is 
emptied of its persuasive power. All else 
is subsidiary and incidental, peculiar to the 
individual, whether the peculiarity be physi- 
cal, or mental, or rhetorical. Individuality 
and personality are not equivalents in mean- 
ing. The individual is the limited, the par- 
tial, the changing; the personal is the 
essential, the inclusive, the permanent. It 
is the fixed, intelligent certitude of soul, 
rooted in that knowledge of self which is 
the outcome of a personal testing of Divine 
truth, which constitutes the unfailing and 
inexhaustible source of moral power in the 
preacher. The Gospel must be in him, a 
well of water springing into everlasting 
life, untouched by drought or frost, refresh- 
ing his own spirit, and quenching the thirst 
of others. If any of you entertain the 
notion that anything can be a substitute for 
this, a ministry of ten years will strip you 
of the illusion. 

I want to make a threefold application 



60 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

of this principle : first, to the physical con- 
dition of the preacher ; then, to his devo- 
tional temper ■ and finally, to his rhetorical 
culture. 

Our age is an age of physical culture. 
The gymnasium crowds hard upon the 
lecture-room. Muscle enters into competi- 
tion with scholarship in our halls of learn- 
ing. Within certain limits the tendency 
is a sound and healthy one. For the in- 
telligent care of the body is a religious 
duty ; and conscientiousness is sadly de- 
ficient when it permits the habitual dis- 
regard of hygienic laws. Sickliness is not 
an evidence of saintliness ; a pale face is 
not prima facie evidence of power ; and a 
sturdy, vigorous frame is not the sign of 
animalism. But there is need of remem- 
bering that the body is not the measure of 
the soul, that insignificance and weakness 
may hide a giant frame, and exceptional 
force may dwell in a frail body. This 
needs no proof. You will recall Bernard 
and Calvin and Kant and Paul. We have 
all seen men of imposing presence, for 
whom our reverence vanished as soon as 
they opened their lips ; while others bound 
us to them as by links of steel, whose phys- 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 61 

ical insignificance provoked our laughter 
or compassion. Even the ancient proverb 
of a sound mind in a sound body needs 
serious qualification; for history abounds 
in instances of men whose mental sanity 
and moral power have suffered no appre- 
ciable hindrance from constitutional and 
physical infirmities. There is danger here, 
as everywhere else, of hasty generalization, 
from a partial induction of facts. The 
truth is more nearly this, that thorough- 
going rectitude involves reverence for all 
law, physical or moral, human or Divine. 
There is a sense in which all law is moral 
and Divine, universally and eternally obli- 
gatory, ignorance of which is blamable, and 
violation of which is sin. It is your busi- 
ness to understand your body, as much as 
it is your business to understand your soul. 
It is as much your duty to watch over and 
care for }^our body, as it is to save your 
soul. Christ came to redeem them both, 
and you may not do less than fall into line 
with Him. 

Here I place the emphasis, upon an intel- 
ligent, conscientious, reverent care of the 
body, not upon its native vigor, least of 
all upon the magnitude of its proportions. 



62 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

You are not responsible for either height 
or weight. You cannot add to your stat- 
ure. You cannot change the color of your 
eyes or hair. And some of you will have 
a perpetual contest with inherited and con- 
stitutional infirmities. There is one thing 
you can do, are morally bound to do, have 
an intelligent care for the body which is 
yours. You can put your personal integ- 
rity into your mortal flesh. You can pay 
the debt which, under God, you owe to 
brain, and lungs, and stomach. You can 
eat, drink, and sleep, to the glory of God. 
Don't discount these bills. Pay them 
promptly, gladly ; and pay a hundred 
cents on a dollar. You will not understand 
me to advocate self-indulgence ; but such 
an intelligent oversight as the owner of 
horses would give to the animals in his sta- 
bles. It is the moral element in physical 
culture which is of universal obligation ; 
and it is here that the principle applies that 
he only who is faithful in the least can be 
faithful in the highest. Conscientiousness 
admits of no exceptions. Financial honesty 
is a matter of pennies. Veracity does not 
permit lying in little things. Art does not 
disdain exactness in trifles. And it is, in 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 63 

the very nature of things, impossible for a 
man to treat his body with systematic neg- 
ligence or disregard, without suffering in 
mental sanity and moral power. The whole 
history of asceticism proves this. Fastings, 
and vigils, and flagellations unhinged the 
mind, filling it with vagaries and dreams, 
sapping its normal strength, and undermin- 
ing its moral power. The personal integ- 
rity, therefore, the stern and habitual fidel- 
ity to self, which is the secret of moral 
energy, must extend its sovereignty over 
the province of the body, and guard it 
from needless waste. 

What I have said about the care of the 
body is also true of style, and of all those 
minor proprieties which have to do with the 
conduct of public worship. Genuineness 
and simple heartiness are the charm of all 
speech, the beauty of all services. The 
Christian preacher should be a gentleman ; 
that is, a man who is moved by a genuine 
respect for all that is, and who is so true 
that he cannot treat sacred things with 
levity, nor conduct the worship of God in 
a slovenly manner. Many years ago, in 
my church, I had a blunt old Irishman. 
He was a diamond in the rough. He was 



64 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

very poor, but not a beggar. He was un- 
educated, but he knew his Bible. He was 
without polish, ignorant of social etiquette, 
but he was the soul of courtesy and polite- 
ness, unassuming and catholic. He told 
me once that he always put on his coat be- 
fore he conducted family prayers. It was 
a little thing, but it meant a great deal. I 
do not suppose that it would have been a 
sin for him to pray in his shirt sleeves ; but 
he felt that God was entitled to the same 
forms of respectful approach which he 
would have scrupulously observed in call- 
ing upon his friends. He was simply true 
to the inherent fitness of things, and that 
is the soul of courtesy and refinement. 

Hence even the personal habits and dress 
of the minister are worthy of his attention. 
He has no business to be slovenly and vul- 
gar. I recently listened to two distinguished 
scholars who occupy important chairs in 
the University of Berlin. One appeared 
in rusty garments and soiled linen, while 
he droned away in a lifeless fashion for 
nearly an hour. The sight roused in me 
an instinctive resentment. I felt that his 
appearance was an insult to his hearers, 
and that it betokened a want of self-respect, 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 65 

however far these things may have been 
present to his conscious thought. They 
ought to have been present to him. There 
is an everlasting incongruity between great 
learning and dirty collars. The other man 
held an equally high rank in scholarship, 
but he was dressed in faultless taste. His 
neck was clean, his linen was immaculate. 
His beard was closely cropped and care- 
fully brushed, his coat was closely buttoned. 
He was "a gentleman and a scholar." 
There was nothing foppish about him ; he 
was simply a clean, wholesome man, who 
had a keen perception of the fitness of 
things. It was a pleasure to look at him, 
and he spoke as he looked, with freedom, 
exactness, and fiery animation. 

Now, there is an artificial cultivation of 
manners. It infects the tone, the attitude, 
the dress. The elocution becomes pom- 
pous. The dress becomes prescribed and 
official. Mannerism is the worst of man- 
ners. When primary or undue attention 
is given to the form, the life suffers and 
shrivels. And yet, to be perfectly natu- 
ral, observing always that outward deco- 
rum which befits the occasion, demands the 
severest and most unremitting self-disci- 



66 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

pline. It requires the culture of the heart, 
until the spirit in you obtains such clear- 
ness of vision, such intensity of grasp, such 
an intuitive perception of what the occa- 
sion requires, such a fixed purpose to meet 
every emergency as it arises, that the pro- 
prieties will almost take care of themselves, 
as fragrance radiates from the rose and light 
from the sun. Keep the central fires burn- 
ing. I know that my remedy is a severe 
and searching one, and I confess that it is 
easier to preach than to practise ; but I 
confidently appeal to you whether I am 
not right. It is in the conduct of worship, 
as with godliness ; you can have the form 
without the power, but you cannot have 
the power without its appropriate form, 
and where the power is perfect the form 
will be perfect. All beauty comes from 
life, and all vigorous life builds in lines of 
beauty. • 

There is, probably, no part of public 
worship and of pastoral duty which is so 
trying as that of prayer. At the bedside, 
at funerals, on the Lord's day, the prayer 
is the minister's most arduous service. He 
soon discovers that preparation is indis- 
pensable, unless a dead and dry formality 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 67 

shall be permitted to eat out of him all 
elements of fresh and forcible devotion. 
But how shall he prepare himself ? Shall 
he use regular forms, hallowed by antiquity, 
made precious by association, or shall he 
write out his prayers, and commit them to 
memory ? Both methods have been recom- 
mended, and we cannot condemn them as 
wrong, so long as they give free flow to 
spiritual devotion. Much may be gained 
from the study of liturgies. The prayers 
composed by great and saintly men may 
give a deeper tone to our petitions, and a 
wider range to our supplicatory speech. 
Certainly the psalms cannot safely be neg- 
lected, and it may be well sometimes to 
make the pen the instrument of devotion, 
that golden apples may gleam in a frame- 
work of silver. But mechanism must be 
avoided. That is the death of devotion, 
and they who use written forms need ever- 
more to pass them through the fiery cruci- 
ble of personal brooding, until they glow 
and burn again. You must retreat within 
yourself. You must feel the burden of 
your own wants, your blindness, your 
weakness, your sin. You must make the 
sorrows of others your own, and see in the 



68 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

dead face your own mother or babe. Then 
the tiniest hands will open the flood-gates 
of your sympathy. You must impersonate 
the throng, the aged, the mature, the young, 
hearts that are glad, and hearts that are 
crushed ; men and women who are unmur- 
muring and patient, and others who are 
hard and rebellious; and then, with the 
vision of an omniscient and loving Father 
mastering your own soul, you will pray. 
It is a task from which we shrink ; it in- 
volves a long retreat and a wide disper- 
sion, a falling back upon the living centre 
of personal life, whence alone sympathy 
radiates into the universal and Divine ; 
but when you have accomplished the ardu- 
ous task, and the full stream of human want 
courses through your spirit, the coal of fire 
will lie upon your lips. Let us hear once 
more the words of the Master: "When 
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and 
when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy 
Father which is in secret." That is the 
law of all prayer. Every man finds God 
where Augustine found him — within him- 
self. Retreat then within yourself, and 
your prayer will bring the heavens near. 
The secret of devotion is the secret of a 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 69 

forcible style. There is a higher teacher 
than text-books on rhetoric and logic. You 
do well to master these, but if you let them 
master you, your most careful composition 
will lack the intensest vitality. You must 
have your own style and logic. And by 
that I do not mean such petty idiosyncra- 
sies as some men assiduously cultivate, 
mistaking singularity for originality, but 
simple and thorough-going harmony be- 
tween your thought and its form. Do not 
overlay it with factitious adornment. Too 
many jewels are offensive. Preach as you 
would talk to a friend on the theme of 
which you are full. Elevated thought will 
weave its own royal robes. Strong thought 
will always flash out in terse phrases. 
There is a mechanical and a vital use of 
language. It becomes a mechanical instru- 
ment when the primary attention is fixed 
upon words and phrases ; and then it is no 
more than sounding brass and a tinkling 
cymbal. It becomes a vital organ when 
the only care is that the thought shall have 
clear and pungent expression, and then it 
speeds to its mark like a bullet from a 
Minie-rifle. That which you elaborate 
■within the inmost centre, and is then 



70 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

clothed in the language which meanwhile 
has taken shape, will be remembered " by 
you both in substance and form with the 
greatest ease, and will be uttered by you 
with all the energy of natural fervor. The 
failure of severely and systematically doing 
this explains, in my judgment, more than 
anything else, the difficulty which so many 
ministers experience in speaking without 
the use of manuscript. The sermon is 
thought out during the process of composi- 
tion. It should have been thought out be- 
fore a line was written. There is too wide 
a chasm between the thought and the lan- 
guage. The manuscript is too mechanical 
a product ; it is not the free and natural 
utterance of the burning thought. The 
style is full of strain and labor, and, if the 
sermon so composed should be committed 
to memory, and then preached, everybody 
would detect the incongruity. Such ser- 
mons must be read, for a free style cannot be 
elaborate. You must preach as you think, 
and as you would speak, when your thought 
is at white heat. There are manuscript 
sermons which are composed in that way, 
under the rush of a kindled intelligence, 
and with the whole order of thought clearly 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 71 

grasped in advance, and should such man- 
uscripts be mislaid, the preacher would find 
but little trouble in reproducing the whole 
in free speech. The rule is a universal one, 
that he who is master of himself, whose 
thought assumes the form of profound, 
personal conviction, will find it compara- 
tively easy to cultivate a clear and forcible 
utterance, and will escape the slavery 
which compels some men to clutch their 
paper as if in conscious danger of momen- 
tary shipwreck. 

I think you will agree with me that the 
various recommendations given in treatises 
on homiletics, bearing on the personal ele- 
ment in preaching, may be reduced to this 
one: the clearness and certitude of self- 
knowledge. There must be no haziness. 
There must be no doubt. And then there 
is required the simple courage which is 
content to let the inner man have his way. 
In a word, be yourself. That is the easiest 
said and the hardest done. The real man 
in us all is overlaid with artificialities and 
traditionalisms, whose wrappings cling to 
us and hinder free movement, as did the 
bandages which fettered the risen Lazarus. 
It requires bravery, energy, and time to 



72 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

tear them away. If within twenty years 
yon have sncceeded in becoming yonrself, 
in clearly grasping your real thought, and 
clothing it in the forms of natural speech, 
you have done a great work. The ministry 
of pure law is always one of condemnation. 
The attempt to cultivate an external con- 
formity to its precepts, keeps us forever in 
bondage. It is only when law becomes life, 
when the spirit itself is roused from its 
lethargy and comes into conscious posses- 
sion of its indefeasible heritage, that the 
reign of liberty begins. Then the rules 
learned by rote, and received upon author- 
ity, enact themselves, and thought runs 
along the prescribed lines without friction. 
Logic, it has well been said, does not teach 
us how we ought to think, but how we 
do think. Its function is not legislative, 
but descriptive. Rhetoric does not teach 
us how we ought to speak, but how we do 
speak when we have something to say. 
Its function is not legislative, but descrip- 
tive. No man has mastered either logic or 
rhetoric until he has mastered himself; for 
logic only interprets the processes of clear 
thinking, and rhetoric is only the science 
of clear expression. 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 73 

So then "Know Thyself" is the preacher's 
simple and comprehensive canon. And its 
simplicity constitutes its severity. It com- 
pels you to be a philosopher. It summons 
you to severe and incessant introspection. 
It forces you back upon the primitive de- 
liverances of consciousness. It compels 
you to sift these, until only the purest 
wheat remains. Psychology and ethics are 
the handmaids of oratory. No preacher 
can afford to neglect these studies, not 
merely because they are the instruments of 
the severest mental discipline, but because 
they force him to understand himself, and 
to find within his own nature the eternal 
basis of certitude. Frederick W. Robert- 
son read Plato and Aristotle for mental 
inspiration and equipment. This may seem 
a very severe diet, but roast beef makes 
blood and is better than ice cream and 
cake. The earnest attempt to find out 
what Kant is after in the Critique of Pure 
Reason, and the intelligent comparison of 
his assumptions and conclusions with the 
unvarnished testimony of your own con- 
sciousness, will help you more in preach- 
ing, than devouring a whole library of 
modern literature. We read too much, we 



74 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

think too little. The first is easy, the 
second is hard. You may say that meta- 
physics are dull and make your head ache. 
That is inevitable ; for if you want the best, 
you must pay the price. You complain 
that philosophy leads to nothing practical. 
It brings you face to face with yourself, 
and nothing is more supremely practical 
than that. You reply that the results are 
meagre at the best, and that they are often 
contradictory, if not incomprehensible and 
absurd. But bulk is not the measure of 
value, and he who seeks to know himself, 
digs in the deepest mines where the choic- 
est treasures are stored. You insist that 
it is the preacher's business to know his 
Bible, and to interpret the mind of God ; 
but it is in the primary and necessary deliv- 
erances of your rational and moral nature 
that the conviction of God's existence 
forces itself upon you; you can under- 
stand your Bible only in personal experi- 
ence of its redemptive revelation ; and you 
can know in certainty the mind of God 
only as that has mastered your own reason 
by its inherent rationality. When you 
transcend the bounds of personal convic- 
tion, your speech is empty and impotent. 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 75 

You tell me that the preacher should be a 
student of human nature. It is a favorite 
phrase, and it is often said that ministers 
do not know men. So far as there is any 
truth in the charge, it is because the 
preacher does not know himself. The 
man in him has become a bandaged and 
dried-up mummy, and the remedy is in 
setting his own manhood at liberty. The 
knowledge of others conies primarily by 
the knowledge of self. Find out what you 
are ; catalogue your own fears and hopes ; 
survey the field of your own moral conflict ; 
note carefully the force which any state- 
ment makes upon your own mind and 
heart ; analyze the secret of that authority 
before which you lie prostrate in the dust ; 
and you will know every other man. All 
men are like yourself ; and in the clear 
study of that bit of human nature which 
you have and are, you will reach the sci- 
ence of humanity in its essential life. 
There need be no timidity here ; utter 
yourself, and your words will command 
universal attention and acceptance. 

It is equally clear that such a method 
imposes its restrictions. It is often said 
that we must have a theology which can 



76 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

be preached. This is only another way of 
saying that theology has for us its neces- 
sary limitations, and that these limitations 
grow out of the relation between the 
preacher and his hearers. They must be 
persuaded, and to persuade them he must 
first himself be persuaded. He must speak 
of his own knowledge. The force of his 
appeal lies in the energy of his personal 
conviction. He is pre-eminently and ex- 
clusively a witness. He must be a seer. 
He must be rigid with himself in excluding 
speculation from his public utterances, 
courageously confessing ignorance where 
ignorance describes his real mental attitude. 
He must be bravely true to himself, and 
speak only that of which he is firmly 
convinced. It behooves him to master his 
own doubts first, before he thrusts them 
upon others. He must tear down only 
when he is fully prepared to build up. Do 
not feed your people on green apples. 
Wait until they are ripe. From the fierce 
and fiery conflict with doubt, no thoughtful 
man can be exempt. There will come days 
and weeks when the midnight and tempest 
are upon your soul, when you cry beneath 
heavens of brass. But even then you will 



THE PERSONAL ELEMENT. 77 

feel that you need a God, that the soul 
hungers after righteousness ; that truth 
and holiness are priceless and binding, 
even if death ends all. Preach these things 
amid the enveloping blackness ; be true to 
yourself even then, and your ministry will 
not be in vain. By and by the old faith 
will come back. You will not drift away 
from your mother's knees, where you first 
learned to pray; you will not lose the 
radiant vision of your Lord. Your path 
may lie through thick and tangled forests 
and over rocky steeps, but you will stand 
at last upon the lofty table-lands, kissed 
by the rays of an eternal noon. Remem- 
ber, I pray you, the words of your Lord 
and mine : "If any man wills to do Crods 
will, he shall know of the doctrine." 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT IN 
PREACHING. 

I am aware that the wording of my 
theme is calculated to arouse suspicion and 
distrust. For it is the fashion in some 
quarters to denounce ethical preaching, 
and the preaching of ethics. We are all 
warned that such a procedure is the open 
door into naturalism and rationalism. Ev- 
erything here depends upon our definitions. 
If by naturalism we understand that tem- 
per and system of thought which excludes 
the supernatural and makes every man his 
own and only redeemer, then the preaching 
which starts with, and incessantly appeals 
to, the ethical testimony of human nature, 
riddles the naturalistic philosophy and 
leaves it without a line of defence. Bush- 
nell was right when he made the soul of 
man the major premise in his argument for 
the supernatural. And that this was Paul's 
78 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 79 

method is clear from the single statement 
in which he gives us the method of his min- 
istry, that he sought to commend himself 
to every man's conscience as in the sight 
of God. He made little use of external 
evidence. He did not trouble himself 
about the canon. He appealed to but one 
miracle, the miracle of our Lord's resurrec- 
tion from the dead ; and that was verified 
to him not solely by historical testimony, 
but by personal experience of the power 
of the risen Christ. He let his own soul 
speak, and the argument went straight 
home. No preaching ever was more natu- 
ral, though it was supernatural in every 
fibre. The philosophy which eliminates the 
supernatural is hopelessly shattered in the 
court of every man's conscience. The 
denial of the living God involves discredit 
of the moral nature, whose ingrained sense 
of guilt and consciousness of weakness 
demand a pardoning and redeeming God. 
Hence, Tertullian speaks of the soul's tes- 
timony as naturally Christian; and Augus- 
tine describes the heart of man as restless 
until it found its rest in God. If our 
preaching is to be vital, and not mechanical, 
it must be fearlessly natural, grounded in 



80 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

the conviction that the scheme of redemp- 
tion is perfectly adapted to the needs of 
man, and fitted to evoke his intelligent and 
cordial response. 

And what is meant by rationalism ? He 
who takes the ground that the unaided 
reason of man is competent to fathom the 
depths of his own being, to explain the 
riddle of his own existence, to solve the 
problem of his own moral contradiction 
and unrest, cannot even convert himself 
to his creed, much less disciple others. Be 
it so, that we are only children, " crying 
in the night, and with no language but a 
cry," the cry is there ; and in that cry, 
which nothing can stifle, the reason in man 
leaps over the boundaries of inductive logic. 
It falls back upon its primitive constitution 
as demanding a higher and an infallible 
tuition. We believe the Gospel, with its 
revelation of the impartial and infinite 
love of God, its assurance of free forgive- 
ness, its promise of Divine help, and its 
disclosure of the life everlasting, to be an 
answer to that cry, breathing peace, coins 
age, and undying hope into human hearts ; 
and that makes it supremely rational. Here 
again we may learn from Paul. His author- 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 81 

ity was frequently challenged. The high- 
church party of his day claimed that he 
was not an apostle, because he had never 
been a personal disciple of Christ ; and the 
eleven had distinctly decided, when they 
proceeded to fill the vacancy created by 
the apostasy and suicide of Judas, that the 
lapsed bishopric could be held only by a 
man who belonged to the ranks of those 
who, from the baptism of John to the 
ascension, had followed Christ. They cast 
their lots, and solemnly ordained Matthias 
by the laying on of hands. We hear 
nothing more of him. He had the title ; 
but the energy descended upon Saul of 
Tarsus, a man who never received apostolic 
ordination, though he did secure apostolic 
recognition at the Council of Jerusalem. 
Upon what did he base his claim to be 
regarded as the peer of James, John, and 
Peter, the pillars of the infant church? 
He declared that he, too, had seen the 
Lord. The miracles of an apostle had 
been wrought by him, and he could appeal 
to these as the credentials of his Divine 
commission. But he laid the primary 
emphasis upon the results of his preach- 
ing. He was of insignificant stature and 



82 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

lacked many of the graces of oratory ; but 
he could say that he had been mighty 
through God in pulling down strongholds, 
in casting down imaginations and every 
high thing which exalted itself against the 
knowledge of God, bringing into captivity 
every thought to the obedience of Christ. 
That describes his preaching. It was a 
mighty intellectual wrestle, before which 
every antagonist went down. It was not 
the logic of the schools, but it was that 
mightier logic w^hich Sir William Hamil- 
ton said Dr. Guthrie possessed, in which 
there was but one step between the premise 
and the conclusion. There is generally 
the most of reason where there is the least 
of argument, where the speech compels 
every man to listen to the authority within. 
Let us not deceive ourselves. The preach- 
ing which subdued the Roman and the 
Greek, which vanquished the sword and 
the pen, the preaching of which Paul was 
the most eminent and successful represen- 
tative, is the only preaching which can 
master and subdue the life of our day. It 
must be rational. It must make the thought 
of man captive. It must make the hearer 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 83 

see that fidelity to self compels glad sur- 
render to Jesus Christ. 

There are some who make a distinction 
between the intellectual and the moral 
nature, between the understanding and 
the reason, on the basis of the Kantian 
philosophy. It has been a favorite and 
familiar thesis that the reason leads us 
only a little way, and then hands us over 
to the authority of faith. Reason shows 
the necessity of revelation and redemption, 
and must examine the credentials of a 
Divine messenger ; but at that point reason 
must submit. It never has submitted, and 
it never will submit. It insists that the 
message, in all its parts and as an organic 
whole, shall be rational, shine in the radi- 
ance of self-evident truth. You cannot deal 
with the reason and neglect the conscience. 
The soul is a living unity, in whose con- 
scious life the intellectual and the ethical 
elements perpetually blend. You can have 
no psychology which does not assume the 
veracity of consciousness ; you can have 
no true thought which does not reverence 
each separate fact, and all the facts in their 
natural order and in their completeness. 
The ethical is the primary and inclusive 



84 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

category of the understanding, and all true 
thinking is at heart an ethical process. 
Nor, -on the other hand, can the moral 
nature act in severance from the intel- 
lectual. Every moral deliverance is an 
act of judgment, a -consciously rational 
verdict. Thus the science of the soul is 
an organic, indissoluble unity, where the 
intellectual and the ethical elements con- 
stantly balance and interpenetrate each 
other; so that we may say that nothing 
is rational which is not right, and nothing 
is right which is not rational; while the 
relation between God and the soul is such 
that nothing can be rational and right for 
man which is not also rational and right 
for God, and nothing can be divinely ra- 
tional and right for God which does not 
command the soul's prompt and cordial 
response. Men need only to be true to 
themselves, to have the truth of God mas- 
ter them. This does not make the human 
reason the seat of primary authority and 
infallible ; but it does affirm the capacity 
of the reason in man to discern and verify 
the truth of Divine revelation. Otherwise, 
inspiration itself would be impossible and 
inconceivable ; for in inspired men the 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 85 

highest thoughts of God burn and glow in 
words and phrases that are full of the fire 
of personal rational conviction. And so 
the Bible continues to be the greatest of all 
books, because it lies nearest to the level 
of true human thought. Ethical preach- 
ing and the preaching of ethics do not, 
therefore, involve a lapse into naturalism 
or rationalism, as systems of thought which 
exclude the supernatural. They carry us 
resistlessly into the supernatural ; nay, the 
ethical life moves and has its being in the 
supernatural. Man is already in the realm 
of the supernatural and needs no railway 
of logic to convey him to its edge. 

But now, let me say further, that a sharp 
distinction must be made between ethical 
preaching and the preaching of ethics. The 
two are not synonymous. When you change 
the adjective into a noun, you radically 
change the conception. In the one case 
you define a certain quality of the preach- 
ing, its pervading and peculiar tone, 
without saying anything about its con- 
tents. In the other case you trace the 
boundaries of the subject matter of preach- 
ing. Ethical preaching is something very 
different from the preaching of ethics ; at 



86 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 

least, in clear thinking, the two should not 
be confounded. I plead for the first, not 
for the second. It is the good news of re- 
demption in Jesus Christ which we are to 
preach, not a code of theoretic and practi- 
cal morals. There are a thousand ques- 
tions in casuistry upon which the Bible 
does not touch, and upon which the preacher 
has no right to pronounce judgment. The 
Scriptures deal first of all with a succession 
of great redemptive acts, culminating in 
the Incarnation, Atonement, and Ascen- 
sion ; then with fundamental, self-evident, 
and universally authoritative principles of 
moral life ; and with specific precepts only 
as these grow out of principles. The apos- 
tle Paul could not take up a collection for 
the poor in Jerusalem, without referring 
to the unspeakable gift of God in Jesus 
Christ. What men shall eat and drink, 
what raiment they shall wear, what houses 
they shall live in, what ticket they shall 
vote, what amusements and recreations 
they shall indulge in, it is not for the 
preacher to say. In these matters every 
man must stand and fall to his own mas- 
ter. The responsibility rests with him, and 
him alone, of making personal application 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 87 

of the general principles of righteousness. 
He may not make a brute of himself ; he 
may not ignore the claims of God and of 
his fellow-men ; he may not bargain away 
the eternities for temporal advantage ; you 
may and must summon him to integrity, 
honesty, chastity, charity; and the more 
you do this, the more impregnable will be 
your vantage-ground, the more authorita- 
tive will become your speech. But when 
you attempt to be a censor of private 
morals or a critic of public policy, how- 
ever honest your intentions or commend- 
able your motives, you will provoke dissent 
from every hearer whose good will it is 
worth while to retain. For you are to 
preach to men, whom you are to urge to 
thoughtful, personal independence, whose 
character is to be unfolded from the germ 
of personal integrity. 

Even on the widest definition, the 
preacher is vastly more than a lecturer 
on ethics. For ethics, as a science, deals 
with the elucidation of principles of con- 
duct and character on the basis of an in- 
ductive psychological analysis, and with 
the applications of these principles to pres- 
ent earthly relations. It cannot bring to 



88 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

view the highest motives to repentance, 
such as are found in the love of God and 
the sacrifice of the Cross. It may com- 
mand and rebuke, but it cannot create 
anew and comfort. Its message is legal, 
not evangelical, and you are summoned to 
speak of pardon and purity as made avail- 
able for man by the grace of God in Christ 
Jesus. But while it is not your vocation 
to be a preacher of ethics, the ethical qual- 
ity must be regnant in all your preaching, 
determining your own personal mental tem- 
per, controlling your interpretation of the 
Gospel, and giving definiteness of aim to 
your speech. 

The temper of your own mind must be 
ethical. Moral rectitude is the first canon 
which you are to regard in the preparation 
of every sermon, in the selection of every 
text, in its interpretation, in the unfolding 
and application of its doctrine. The sub- 
tlest temptations of the preacher are along 
the lines of mental and spiritual demagog- 
ism. He is tempted to act the politician, 
to use unworthy means in order to secure 
laudable ends. He is in danger of playing 
with himself and with his message. It has 
been said of Chalmers that his most marked 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 89 

quality was the white heat of his earnest- 
ness. His sentences were long and in- 
volved, his logic was circular and kaleido- 
scopic ; but the repetition of his thought 
only made its transparent and glowing hon- 
esty all the more apparent ; and while in 
rhetoric and logic the eminent Scotch 
preacher may not be your ideal, in the 
ethical loyalty of his mind he commands 
our admiration and is worthy of our imita- 
tion. Here is the primary root of personal 
power. It distinguished Knox and Calvin 
and Luther and Paul. Nowhere is it more 
marked than in the recorded discourses of 
our Lord, whose sublimity is in their sim- 
plicity, whose authority is in their radical 
integrity. We are never weary of insisting 
that the preacher must be a good man; 
that he must live out of the pulpit as he 
talks in it, and we do well. But we do not 
carry the ethical imperative far enough 
when we stop there ; we must extend its 
authority over the subtlest, and most secret, 
mental and spiritual processes. The ethi- 
cal temper of which I speak will prevent a 
man from making an unauthorized use of 
Scripture language, and will prompt him 
to commit his manuscript to the flames, if 



90 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

at the eleventh hour he discovers that his 
interpretation is vicious or even doubtful. 
It will guard him against overstatement 
and undue emphasis, and make him jealous 
to maintain the natural perspective of truth. 
I heard a sermon some years since, of which 
a friend said to me : " It was excellent, but 
the first sentence was not true." The crit- 
icism was deserved. The preacher over- 
shot the mark, and so threw away his op- 
portunity at the outset. The introduction 
cannot be too severely simple and trans- 
parent. With equal naturalness should the 
theme grow out of the text. Infinitely 
better is it to do without a text than to 
twist it to your purpose. That is dis- 
honest, and the noblest argument will be 
vitiated by it. Even on the rostrum of 
political debate sincerity conquers, and 
special pleading digs its own grave ; in the 
pulpit, and when you venture to speak in 
the name of God, you can command a hear- 
ing for your cause only as you establish a 
reputation for intellectual sincerity. 

It is this demand for ethical uprightness 
which has swept the Presbyterian churches, 
most conservative of all ecclesiastical bodies, 
into the revision controversy. The West- 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 91 

minister Confession does not represent the 
living pulpit. Its phrases are repudiated ; 
the logical order of its doctrines is re- 
jected. Men feel that they have haggled 
long enough about substance of doctrine, 
a phrase which every man interprets to 
suit himself. They want a creed to which 
they can subscribe without mental reserva- 
tions and unworthy subterfuges, and this 
great church will renew its youth when it 
shall have burst asunder these shackles. 
For orthodoxy is right thinking, and when 
a creed ceases to represent the sincere con- 
victions of those who subscribe to it, the 
professed orthodoxy is the rankest kind of 
heresy, which neither wealth nor numbers 
can save from the contempt to which even 
the semblance of dishonesty is doomed. 

But the ethical element must not only 
give tone to the preacher's habitual mental 
temper ; it must determine his theological 
method as well. He deals with ethical 
verities, with God and the soul, with sin, 
lav/, grace, salvation, and judgment. These 
truths are ethical in their content and 
import, whatever may be the etymological 
origin of the words. They must be ethi- 
cally interpreted. 



92 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

The doctrine of an inspired Bible, for 
instance, in whatever form it may be stated, 
reposes at last upon the perception of an 
ethical fact. Reach it, if yon will, by the 
path of authenticity and integrity of the 
documents, and thence by appeal to proph- 
ecy and miracle, your primary affirmation 
is that the writers were credible witnesses. 
They did not lie, and they could not have 
been deceived. That ethical affirmation is 
the bed-rock upon which the elaborate ar- 
gument is based, and by which its every 
part is sustained. Or take the more usual 
method in contemporary dogmatics. You 
believe in the Bible because you believe 
Jesus Christ; and you believe Him be- 
cause you believe in Him. Your confidence 
in what He says, is based upon your con- 
fidence in His personal integrity. His 
moral sanity and sincerity subdue you. 
You hardly think of the miracles ; His 
ethical perfection and His spiritual eleva- 
tion win your confidence, and make it easy 
for you to believe Him when He makes the 
most startling declarations about Himself 
and the future. You believe Him to be 
God because you have faith in Him as 
man. You believe in eternal retribution, 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 93 

in heaven and hell, because He taught it. 
He holds you. To suggest that He ever 
lost his mental poise is to you blasphemy. 
Thus Christianity rests upon the percep- 
tion of an ethical fact which no criticism 
has been able to invalidate ; and the more 
closely you keep that fact in view, the 
more pungent and powerful will your 
preaching be. Let me urge you never to 
permit any conscious slacking in the ten- 
sion of this profound ethical confidence in 
your Lord. Christianity is Christ. 

The contents of Christian teaching de- 
mand a similar treatment. They are rightly 
understood, either as separate doctrines or 
as an articulated system, only when they 
are ethically interpreted. The letter kill- 
eth; only the spirit maketh alive, and a 
living theology is always in danger of be- 
ing strangled by an excessive literalism, 
under whose pressure the ethical element 
vanishes. If we regard the Gospel in its 
widest aspect as the revelation of redemp- 
tive action in man's behalf, our construc- 
tion of this action in the several forms of 
atonement, regeneration, faith, and repent- 
ance will depend upon our previous con- 
ception of what God is and what man is. 



94 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

Grace, as unmerited favor, leads to sov- 
ereignty, the infinite freedom of the Divine 
nature ; sin, as the transgression of law, 
implies the existence of definite relations 
between the offender and the judge. Or, 
to phrase it differently, the remedial sys- 
tem is imbedded in the moral system, and 
must be conformed thereto. What that 
moral system is, of which the Gospel is the 
crowning exposition, will depend upon our 
theological and anthropological postulates. 
Start with the absolute freedom of God, as 
the essential energy lying back of His nat- 
ure, determining its contents and expres- 
sion, resolving Him into causative will, 
and you are forced either into virtual 
pantheism, denying the existence and effi- 
ciency of second causes, or into a mechani- 
cal interpretation of moral government, 
where covenants and constitutions play 
their mysterious and bewildering parts. 
Power becomes the basis of authority, de- 
manding blind submission, refusing a dis- 
closure of its rational ground. Supralap- 
sarianism completely eliminates the ethical 
element in the government of the world. 
Nor does it obtain its rightful place where 
one Divine attribute is made central, im- 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 95 

posing its limitations upon all the rest, as 
in those systems where justice is declared 
to be necessary and love optional, where 
law is regarded as universal in its opera- 
tion, while grace is limited to the elect. 
The gravest objection to such a construc- 
tion is not that it perplexes and outrages 
the human sense of impartial treatment, 
but that it surrenders and shatters the 
eternal ethical unity of the Divine Being, 
introducing conflict and contradiction into 
His essential nature. Reverse the order 
by making love primary and regnant, re- 
ducing justice to a conglomerate of benevo- 
lence and wisdom, divesting it of its ideal 
and immutable sovereignty, and you are 
involved in the same inconsistency and con- 
tradiction. Grace reigns through right- 
eousness. Holiness and love are coefficients 
in all Divine ethical action, whether in 
redemption or in judgment. The ethical 
unity, or eternal moral perfection, of God, 
is vastly more important for biblical theol- 
ogy than the unity of His essential Being. 
If we turn to man as the subject of Divine 
rule, the ethical interpretation of his nat- 
ure, relations, and responsibilities again de- 
mands sovereign recognition. No doctrine 



96 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

of original sin, nor of imputation, nor of 
human inability can stand which presses 
figurative phrases into its support, which 
leaves unnoticed the numerous qualifying 
statements, and which contradicts the nor- 
mal testimony of the moral consciousness. 
Responsibility and sovereign grace receive 
equal and balanced emphasis in the Scrip- 
tures. No theory of responsibility is bibli- 
cal which makes man competent to save 
himself. No theory of grace is biblical 
which makes man passive in regeneration, 
supernaturally acted upon without his 
knowledge and election, irrespective of the 
moral temper of his personal life. Natural 
ability, fettered by utter moral impotence, 
will not cut the Gordian knot. Such ability 
is only a phrase, a misnomer, an utterly 
illusive possession. Moral law implies some 
form or degree of moral ability, however 
inadequate and impartial that ability may 
be. The bondage of the will is not its 
paralysis or extinction. There may be only 
a despairing cry, like that which escaped 
from Paul when he pictured the man in 
whom the Divine law had made its living 
authority felt; but there is life in a cry. 
I am not attempting to frame a science of 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 97 

moral government; I am simply insisting 
that in such a science the procedure must 
be consistently and thoroughly ethical, 
preserving the ethical unity of the Divine 
nature, and doing no violence to the ethical 
nature of man. Neither responsibility nor 
grace may be reduced to a thing of me- 
chanics. The Bible does not do that. It 
affirms both with equal boldness, with an 
utter absence of conscious contradiction; 
and, in its ever-blending homage to the 
behests of moral law, and the confession 
of moral weakness, in its language of 
mingled self-condemnation and appeal for 
mercy, the soul of man but repeats and 
confirms the speech of inspiration. Augus- 
tinianism and Pelagianism, Calvinism and 
Arminianism, have yet to meet, by converg- 
ing lines, upon a common platform, where 
equal justice shall be done to God as moral 
sovereign, and to man as his moral subject. 
Responsibility involves ethical freedom ; 
the Divine sovereignty is an ethical energy, 
in whose exercise all the moral perfections 
combine, and every soul is reached. 

The whole of what we call moral law, or 
moral government, is included in our doc- 
trine of what God is, and what man is. 



98 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

There are only two ethical verities, God 
and the soul; all other phrases do but 
describe the personal relations between the 
two, and these personal relations are deter- 
mined by the respective natures of the 
beings related. These beings are ethical, 
and hence their relations must be ethical. 
They are brought face to face, not joined 
by intermediary compacts. Moral law and 
moral government are not a tertium quid, 
having independent existence and author- 
ity. Moral law is simply the expression 
of the Divine judgment, and in that judg- 
ment His eternal ethical personality is 
voiced; and so moral law is in perfect 
correspondence with the ethical nature of 
man ; moral government is simply the ethi- 
cal energy of God's personal rule. We 
are in constant danger of being misled by 
the figurative quality of all language. 
Our rhetoric gets the best of our logic. 
Our imagination plays tricks with our rea- 
son. Popular phrases are converted into 
philosophy. We sharply rebuke men for 
speaking of evolution, natural selection, 
and the like, as if these made a creative 
and directing intelligence needless. We 
reply that a scientific phrase can do nothing, 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 99 

that it can only indicate how a thing is 
done, that evolution implies an energy 
which evolves, and natural selection an 
energy which selects. But we do not take 
our own medicine. We talk of a moral 
system, of Divine covenants and constitu- 
tions, as if these were actual things, instead 
of being simply human phrases by which 
we attempt to define the eternal ethical 
relations between God and man. If I may 
speak for myself I would say that I can 
use all the verbal forms of every school of 
Christian theology ; but at a certain point 
in my thinking, I drop them all, and I am 
conscious of only two things, — what God 
is, and what I am. These are the two fixed 
centres in the far-sweeping ellipse of Chris- 
tian thought, and from them the whole field 
of moral truth must be surveyed. Perhaps 
you will be disposed to emphasize a Christo- 
centric attitude, as Christ is both the visible 
embodiment of God and of man. For prac- 
tical purposes there would be no difference 
between us; but I need only remind you 
that you cannot define the person of Christ 
until you have made clear to yourself what 
God is, and what man is, to make it plain 
that my statement only carries the matter 



100 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

a step further back, and lays stress upon 
the primary, fundamental ethical concep- 
tions which dominate the whole circle of 
theological thought. Every doctrine dis- 
closes, in the final analysis, these two ele- 
mentary ethical conceptions, and in their 
light the doctrines must be interpreted, 
whether separately or in their rational com- 
pleteness. Along the entire line of Chris- 
tian exposition, from the idea of creation 
to that of the final judgment, the kernel 
of truth has been reached only when its 
ethical elements have been clearly appre- 
hended and firmly grasped ; and from this 
inner centre of mystery the return will be 
easy to the free use of all the varied 
imagery which has been consecrated in 
Christian speech. 

Now, then, with soul erect and rifle 
charged, what shall be your aim? It is 
your vocation to beseech men to be recon- 
ciled to God, to give joyful credence to the 
message of free forgiveness in Christ, and 
to take the yoke of obedience to Him upon, 
them. But to secure such a response, you 
must evoke from them the confession of 
personal guilt, and open their eyes to the 
glory of the Lord. They must see their 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 101 

own sin, and they must see His righteous- 
ness. It is an ethical result which you are 
seeking to gain, and therefore your appeal 
must be to the ethical nature. In popular 
phrase, you must train your guns upon the 
conscience of the hearer. And what is 
conscience? The best definition of the 
word, closely following its etymological 
derivation, which I have ever seen, makes 
it the soul's power of passing judgment 
upon itself, upon its thoughts, motives, 
and actions, a universal, pervasive, judicial 
quality of its conscious life. It does not 
supply its own law. That makes its appeal 
to the reason, and is discerned by the rea- 
son, but when once the rational imperative 
has been heard, the soul instantly passes 
judgment upon itself in view of its con- 
formity to the law which the moral reason 
has proclaimed. The appeal to the con- 
science, therefore, is simply a summons to 
the soul to exercise its highest ethical pre- 
rogative. It is only indirectly, and medi- 
ately, that you can convince any man. He 
must convict and convince himself. Hence 
illumination is represented as the primary 
function of the ministry of the Holy Spirit ; 
while spiritual perception, and the moral 



102 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

judgment following it, are the acts of the 
soul under the revelation of the truth. 
Personal responsibility requires no argu- 
ment. The moral law is in need of no de- 
fence. The perfections of God are radiant 
in their own light. The life and teachings 
of Jesus Christ commend themselves to 
every honest and earnest hearer. These 
great themes are to be handled by you in 
the profound conviction that their author- 
ity cannot be impugned, with an urgency 
which will give the hearer no rest until he 
passes judgment upon himself, and shapes 
his course accordingly. This will not make 
your preaching hortatory. It is a good rule 
that the exhortation should be brief, with 
the force of solid argument behind it. In 
its direct form it may often be wise to omit 
it. Leave the truth to do its own work. 
Throw the man upon himself. If you have 
brought him face to face with God, you 
may retire. But to secure that should be 
your overmastering passion, so that the 
Divine presence may produce self-convic- 
tion, confession, penitence, faith. Never 
permit yourself to forget that to provoke 
men to self -judgment, in the sight of God, 
is your vocation, and should be the aim of 



THE ETHICAL ELEMENT. 103 

all your discourse ; and if your preaching 
be directed to this ethical end, its eternal 
undertone, majestic and mighty, will be, 
" Now is the day of salvation" summoning 
to instant decision and prompt obedience. 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT IN 
PEEACHING. 

You have been taught that the Reforma- 
tion of the sixteenth century was distin- 
guished by two things : the appeal to Holy 
Scripture in the settlement of all questions 
of Christian faith and conduct, and the 
conception of religion as justification by 
faith, as constituted and conserved by per- 
sonal and spiritual acts, not by priestly and 
sacramental offices. These are, respectively, 
the formal and the material principles of 
Protestant Christianity. Of the two, the 
latter is by far the more radical and revo- 
lutionary, because the preliminary and pre- 
cedent conception of religion becomes, 
consciously or unconsciously, a canon of 
criticism and interpretation. It gives us, 
whether we recognize it or not, an imperium 
in imperio, a Bible within a Bible, a single 
sovereign message dominating the whole 
course, and explaining all the contents, of 
104 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 105 

Divine revelation. This explains Luther's 
attitude towards the epistle by James. It 
was to him a letter of straw, because he 
could not find in it the Pauline conception 
of the Gospel. The judgment was not 
based upon a critical sifting of historical evi- 
dence, much less was the procedure ration- 
alistic, as proceeding from a denial of the 
supernatural ; it was simply applying his 
conception of the Gospel to each separate 
document, and determining its relative au- 
thority by the comparison. It is a danger- 
ous principle in the hands of weak men, and 
easily leads into all manner of vagary ; for 
it is not so much an intellectual judgment, 
as it is a spiritual intuition, through the ex- 
perimental mastery which comes only by 
moral conflict, of that single message which 
constitutes the vital substance and form of 
the Bible. If Luther knew anything, he 
knew what it was to be justified by faith in 
Jesus Christ ; and this made him alike inde- 
pendent of ecclesiastical tradition, and of a 
slavish interpretation of the mere letter. 
A nominal apostle had for him no more 
authority than the decree of a Pope. 

After him and with the decadence of 
earnest spiritual life, the point of emphasis 



106 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

shifted from the material to the formal 
principle, from the Gospel itself to the 
Bible which contains it in written form. 
Justification by faith became itself only 
a dogma, while the main contention con- 
cerned the authority of the Scriptures, and 
the ground upon which that authority re- 
posed. Against the infallibility of councils 
and Popes was set the literal infallibility of 
Scripture, involving the theory of mechan- 
ical and verbal inspiration, which thence- 
forward assumed the primary place in 
Christian dogmatics. It was an unfortu- 
nate and mischievous change of base. It 
exposed Protestant Christianity to a double 
assault. Rome replied that the Church 
existed before the New Testament, and had 
always been the custodian of the sacred 
books, whose authenticity and integrity 
assumed the veracity of this traditional 
testimony, as the autograph manuscripts 
had long since disappeared ; while Biblical 
criticism pointed out that the Hebrew 
vowels were the addition of latter copyists, 
that the extant manuscripts varied widely 
in their textual reading, and in the books 
which they contained, that the Septuagint 
differed from the received Hebrew text, 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 107 

especially in its chronology, and that many 
of the books of the Old Testament, with 
the synoptic Gospels, and the epistle to the 
Hebrews, were either of anonymous author- 
ship, or uncertain in date of composition, 
or composite in literary structure. The 
history of dogmatic thought, for the last 
two hundred and fifty years, has been 
largely an attempt to evade the force of 
these objections, either by reconciling the 
theory with the facts, or by endeavoring 
to withdraw from a position which has 
come to be regarded as untenable. 

A clear and consistent doctrine of Scrip- 
ture is something which Protestantism has 
not yet formulated, and which is still in 
process of constant revision, no version com- 
manding general and hearty assent ; and 
many have taken refuge in the practical use 
of the Bible, without inquiring into the nat- 
ure of inspiration, or the scope of that au- 
thority which inspiration guarantees. Such 
an agnostic position cannot long be main- 
tained, and must act as a perpetual check 
upon ardent souls, who insist upon certainty 
as indispensable to mental poise and moral 
enthusiasm. There can be no biblical 
preaching which does not seize the hide- 



108 PHILOSOPHY OF PBEACHING. 

structible element of Scripture, the one 
message which dominates its entire and 
intricate framework, which is independent 
of lower and higher criticism alike, and 
whose authority is inseparable from its 
proclamation. And in thus passing from 
the letter to the quickening spirit, from 
a collection of pamphlets to the Gospel 
which they contain, we are simply going 
back to Luther, to Paul, and to Christ 
Himself. This is only another way of say- 
ing that the Bible is an organism, a vital 
unity, and not a collection of disjecta mem- 
bra, and that therefore it must be under- 
stood as a whole, before there can be any 
profitable study of its component parts. 
Lower criticism may content itself with a 
comparison of manuscripts, the edition of 
the text, and with grammatical interpreta- 
tion ; higher criticism may advance to the 
more intricate questions of date, author- 
ship, and internal structure ; but the preach- 
er meanwhile must be doing his work. He 
cannot wait for the last word from Tre- 
gelles or Teschendorf, nor for the latest 
theory propounded at Tubingen or Berlin ; 
he must deal with the constant factor 
which all these researches assume ; he must 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 109 

give voice to that Living Word, whose re- 
ality and power are independent of human 
scholarship. He cannot be indifferent to 
what is going on in the universities ; he 
ought to keep himself fully abreast of the 
intellectual life of his time ; but the fierce 
debate should be mainly helpful to him in 
clarifying his discernment of what is pri- 
mary and essential, and of what is secondary 
and of subordinate importance. The net 
result of Christian scholarship will be a 
simple Gospel, whose transcendent and 
transfiguring message glows undimmed 
and uninjured in the fiercest crucible, and 
wins the joyful assent of every earnest 
heart. 

I find myself in hearty agreement with 
a living writer, when he says that " many 
points which now occupy the attention .of 
biblical scholars, and call forth learned 
dissertations and elaborate treatises, are 
not worthy of the attention given them ; 
and their labors will be regarded as the crit- 
ical tithing of the mint, anise, and cumin." 
Some of you may live to see the day when 
the critical acumen of the nineteenth 
century will be regarded as a waste of 
intellectual energy, as we now label the 



110 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

scholastic ingenuity of the Middle Ages, 
and the Gnostic speculations of the earlier 
centuries, when men will wonder that the 
simplicity of the preacher's task, in the 
use of the Bible, should ever have been 
mistaken. The pulpit is not the place for 
raising questions to which an authoritative 
answer cannot be given. Its power is 
in dealing with the universal and self- 
evidencing element in Holy Scripture, with 
a firm reliance that this vital message will 
come home in the power and demonstration 
of the Holy Ghost. 

I am aware that this conception of the 
biblical element in preaching contravenes 
the traditional use of the Scriptures. We 
are never weary of asserting that every 
Christian ought to read his Bible, that 
preaching should be pervasively biblical, 
and that Christian theology, in its separate 
doctrines, and in their logical order, should 
issue from a careful study of the holy 
oracles. I can subscribe to all that. We 
agree in maintaining the plenary religious 
authority of the Bible. It is the preacher's 
text-book, as it is every disciple's manual. 
But what am I to read my Bible for ? Am 
I to make no discrimination in its literary 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT, 111 

contents ; am I to place all its histories, 
and miracles, and legislation upon the same 
level, and insist that everything recorded 
within its covers is of equally binding 
authority upon faith and conduct? Was 
not this the blunder of the early Puritans, 
who found in the enactments of the Jewish 
theocracy the fundamental law for civil 
government, and who therefore believed 
in the forcible suppression of heresy? 
They were true to their logic, but the 
major premise of their reasoning was vi- 
cious, because it assumed that all legislation 
was equally authoritative, unless it had 
been specifically revoked at a subsequent 
time. Are we to be debarred from follow- 
ing the principle of spiritual discrimina- 
tion, which is so marked in our Lord's 
teaching, and whose bold use distinguishes 
the apostle to the Gentiles ? Is there not 
need that we should heed those sharp 
words of rebuke which our Lord uttered 
in the synagogue at Capernaum, " It is the 
spirit which quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth 
nothing; the words which I have spoken 
unto you, they are spirit, and they are 
life"? There is a literalism which dis- 
honors the Bible, because it strangles its 



112 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

life, and silences its sublime testimony. 
It discovers meanings in names and num- 
bers which they were never intended to 
suggest. It finds types of Christ in every- 
thing, with interpretations and applications 
as fanciful as anything ever perpetrated by 
the allegorical school of Alexandria. It 
converts the Bible into a storehouse of 
texts, without any regard to the linguistic 
peculiarities of the writer, the people whom 
he addressed, and the end which he had 
in view. The concordance of Cruden is 
made the commentary of Scripture, and 
an insane man becomes the interpreter of 
an inspired volume.. Balaam's words are 
invested with the same authority as those 
of Moses and Isaiah ; and Caiaphas becomes 
as truly inspired as Paul and John. No 
distinction is made between good men and 
bad men, and even the words of the devil 
are quoted as inspired. Should you ever 
have occasion to preach from the fourth 
verse of the second chapter of Job, where 
we read, " Skin for skin : yea, all that a 
man hath, will he give for his life," I advise 
you to begin your sermon with the sen- 
tence, " That is a lie " / The devil is 
represented as saying that ; and the book 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 113 

of Job proves that he lied when he said it. 
The statement is unqualifiedly false. Men 
will die for their honor, for their country, 
for God and truth. 

You may think that I have selected an 
extreme illustration, and that there is a 
touch of sensationalism in my language, 
but my purpose is simply to remind you 
that the words and the sentences of the 
Bible are not, without further discrimina- 
tion, the Word of Grod which you and I 
are to preach. If you quote Eliphaz, the 
Temanite, or Bilclad, the Shuhite, I shall 
feel at liberty to criticise their ambitious 
theodicies, and under the shield of God's 
own emphatic repudiation, both in the book 
of Job and elsewhere, I shall not shrink 
from labelling their logic as partial, and 
their rhetoric as bombastic. And I should 
do this, because I am jealous of the Word 
of God, because I love it with a holy passion, 
and insist therefore that the real message 
shall not be indiscriminately confounded 
with the literary forms under which it has 
been recorded and preserved. 

The time has forever gone by when the 
human element in the composition of the 
Scriptures can be ignored, or regarded as 



114 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

incidental. They can be fully understood 
only in so far as we are able to reproduce 
the actual environment of their writers, 
and make due allowance for the peculiar 
phraseology in which they uttered their 
thoughts. They used the language and 
the formal logic of their times, and the 
oldest times of the great book are those of 
the imaginative Orient, of the beginnings 
of history, of primitive tradition in poetic 
and pictorial form. Hence the New Testa- 
ment comes more closely home to us than 
the Old. The gospels and epistles are 
written in a language essentially modern, 
with a modern atmosphere and outlook. 
The Sermon on the Mount and the epistles 
of Paul fall in with our habits of thought 
and our use of speech. The farther back 
we go, the more pictorial becomes the lan- 
guage, until it becomes difficult to disen- 
tangle the historical from the ideal in the 
recorded tradition or narrative. 

Nor is the human element confined to 
the phraseology. The theory that the 
writers of Scripture were qualified for their 
work by the gift of supernatural informa- 
tion is, at least in its unqualified form, an 
utterly gratuitous assumption. Luke, at 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 115 

least, has told us how he went to work in 
preparing to write the gospel which bears 
his name, and the Acts of the Apostles. 
These books have generally been regarded 
as entitled to a place in the New Testa- 
ment canon, on the assumption that Luke 
was the companion of an inspired apostle. 
But there is no evidence that Paul had 
anything to do with Luke's literary labors, 
or that he read Luke's manuscripts before 
they were sent to Theophilus. Luke wrote 
for a personal friend, and in the introduc- 
tion to the first part of the story, which 
outlines the life of Christ, he referred to 
the sources of his information, and to the 
care which he had taken to collate, com- 
pare, and critically sift them. From all 
that appears, Luke acted the part simply of 
an earnest, patient, historical student, claim- 
ing no supernatural illumination, and never 
dreaming that his private letters would 
become universally recognized authorities. 
Does this simple explanation deprive these 
letters of their authority? Not in the 
least ; but, on the other hand, their verac- 
ity is more firmly established. For while 
they only profess to record in some logical 
or chronological order the things which 



116 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

were surely believed at the time, the eye- 
witnesses and ministers of the word had 
been consulted, and the result of the 
inquiry was communicated in private let- 
ters — a form of literary composition in 
which any doubt would have been freely 
expressed. 

Nor can Luke be regarded as exceptional 
in this matter. If his writings are to be 
regarded as trustworthy and authoritative, 
the presumption is that the free use and 
incorporation of unknown documents and 
traditions were freely resorted to in the 
compilation of the historical portions of 
the Bible. A faithful use of the royal and 
the priestly archives was all that was needed 
for the composition of the books of the 
Kings and of the Chronicles. Nor can it 
be necessary to maintain that the Penta- 
teuch, as we have it, was written by Moses, 
and that the portions preceding his own 
call were supernaturally communicated to 
him. Even the Mosaic authorship of the 
Pentateuch, which can hardly be said to 
have been seriously assailed, does not com- 
pel us to assume that Genesis is anything 
more than a careful compilation of current 
traditions, serving as an introduction to the 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 117 

real theme of the history. The emphasis 
is on the establishment of the Jewish com- 
monwealth, under the law given at Sinai, 
and not on the length of the creative clays, 
or on the nature of the forbidden fruit, or 
on the extent of the deluge, or on the 
building of the tower of Babel. 

Thus each separate book must be read 
in the light of its living, germinant idea 
and intention. Nor can we stop here. 
When the inductive and analytic process 
has been completed, the results must be 
compared and co-ordinated in their histor- 
ical order, and the main thought which 
dominates the whole must be eliminated. 
That will be the law, the prophets, and 
the Gospel, which you are to preach, 
faintly gleaming in the first promise of 
the seed who should bruise the serpent's 
head, and making radiant the face and 
ministry of Jesus Christ. 

It has been said with truth that criticism 
has not essentially altered the main facts 
of Israel's history. It has labelled some 
things as legendary and allegorical. But 
the Decalogue, the Temple service, the 
Psalms, and the Prophets have remained, 
as showing the great thoughts, and record- 



118 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 

ing the profound spiritual experiences, 
which stirred a multitude of hearts when 
paganism was well-nigh universal, and dis- 
closing the ground upon which that sub- 
lime faith reposed. And it may be said, 
even more emphatically, that a criticism 
which in its extreme form leaves us four 
great Pauline epistles, and which confesses 
that the belief of the early Christians in 
the actual resurrection of Jesus Christ is 
incapable of psychological explanation, has 
accomplished nothing to discredit Chris- 
tianity, and has only placed in stronger 
relief the spiritual energy of that Gospel 
which knows only Christ and Him cruci- 
fied. Thus, with even the most meagre 
equipment, pushing the logic of elimina- 
tion to its utmost verge, the great verities 
of God, and law, and sin, and redemption 
by Jesus Christ, remain as the most potent 
energies in personal experience and in the 
march of history. You can trace these 
thoughts in their orderly development and 
final expression in the fragmentary pam- 
phlets which make up your Bible. If you 
place them in chronological order, the Gos- 
pel by the apostle John will crown the 
literary structure, and the whole will be 



TEE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 119 

radiant in the glory of Him who declared 
that He had come to reveal the Father, and 
to give His life for the world's redemption. 
Here is the vital pulse and the beating 
heart of all Scripture, in the revelation of 
Gcod, in his self-expression, by word and 
deed, by law and prophecy, by precept and 
promise, in personal experience and his- 
tory, in redemption and judgment. You 
are to read the Bible to find out what God 
has to say about Himself, to discover what 
He is, what He thinks of you, and what 
He has done for you. Every one of the 
autograph manuscripts has been lost — 
what of that? There are a hundred thou- 
sand variations in the Greek text of the 
New Testament alone — what of that? 
The genealogies and the chronology of the 
Bible are in hopeles confusion — ivhat of 
that? You are reading a human transla- 
tion — what of that? Suppose Moses did 
not write the major part of the Pentateuch ; 
suppose the Levitical legislation to be 
largely post-exilian ; suppose the latter 
part of Isaiah to be from the pen of an 
unknown author, and Daniel to be an 
anonymous composition of unknown date ; 
suppose Job to be a drama and Jonah an 



120 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

allegory ; suppose the greater part of Gen- 
esis to be the survival of primitive tradi- 
tions in pictorial or poetic form ; suppose 
all this, and much more — what of that ? 
It is well to remember the words of Cardi- 
nal Baronius, that the Scriptures tell us 
how to go to heaven, not how the heavens 
go. Nor were they given us to tell us how 
they came to be that they are, but what 
we must do to be saved, and that God, in 
His love, sent Jesus Christ to save us. 

Is not that Paul's doctrine, when he 
declares that the Scriptures are able to 
make us wise unto salvation, that their 
design is instruction in righteousness ? 
And did not our Lord declare that " eter- 
nal life " was the hidden theme of all 
prophecy, a perpetual anticipation of, and 
testimony to, that Divine redemptive pur- 
pose which secured historical fulfilment 
in Himself ? Let us cease, at least in the 
pulpit, to discuss the cosmogony of Gen- 
esis, the passage of the Red Sea, the 
manna in the wilderness, the story of 
Balaam and his ass, of Jonah and the 
whale, of Joshua and the sun, of demoni- 
acal possession, and especially of the 
Gadarene swine, upon which latter narra- 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 121 

tive Mr. Huxley discourses at such length 
and with so much feeling, as if the fate of 
a few thousand pigs had anything to do 
with the history of man's redemption. 
Are these things the vital, universal mat- 
ter of the Scriptures? For myself, I be- 
lieve in a personal devil and in demoniacal 
possession, though I frankly own that I do 
not know what to make of Balaam and 
Jonah ; but I am not prepared to say that 
a man cannot be saved unless he believes 
in Satan ; I am satisfied if he believes on 
the Lord Jesus Christ. I have heard some 
say as they banged the Book that they be- 
lieved every word within its covers. So 
do I ; but I insist upon reading my Bible 
as that Bible tells me to read it, as the 
revelation of God, as giving me a vivid 
and glorious disclosure of His character, 
and purposes, and redemptive deeds, and 
so waking in me patience, faith, hope, love, 
and joy. The true use of the Bible is not 
that of minute exegesis, nor that of in- 
terpretation from the context, nor that 
of synthetic exposition of each separate 
book, but that of a firm grasp upon its 
great fundamental and universally domi- 
nant verities, which verities are vital and 



122 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

regnant now, and would be, if every copy 
of the Bible should be destroyed. Do not 
misunderstand me. Exegesis cannot be 
too exact. Analysis and synthesis cannot 
be too careful. But when all this has been 
done, it still remains for you to co-ordinate 
all the results under that which is the su- 
preme law of Holy Scripture — the revela- 
tion of God in redemption. That is what 
I mean by biblical preaching, in which 
sin and salvation constitute the perpetual 
undertone, the inspiration of all worship, 
the secret of all emotion, the urgency of 
every appeal, the fire and the force of all 
reasoning. 

If this is not the true use of the Bible, 
then why is it that the Bible is just such a 
book as it is? Surely God could easily 
have so shaped events as to have preserved 
every autograph manuscript of every book 
and psalm in the Bible. In such a case 
we should have been saved all perplexing 
questions of authorship, date, structure, and 
the like. Criticism might have been made 
forever impossible, or only the employment 
of fools. But such is not the Bible which 
we have ; nor can I conceive of any other 
reason why we do not have such a Bible 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 123 

as I have described, than that God never 
intended that we should have such an one ; 
that He was indifferent as to its literal 
preservation ; that just such a Bible as we 
have, with its critical difficulties and un- 
certainties, was meant to be placed in our 
hands and used by us ; and that, therefore, 
the critical problems which are paraded 
with so much ostentation, and which are 
a trial to the faith of so many, are of sub- 
ordinate importance, and should not be per- 
mitted to disturb us in the slightest degree. 
They do not annoy the ignorant man in his 
devotions, to whom the Scriptures are a 
Divine lamp, filled with beaten oil and 
glowing with a celestial flame, lighting up 
for him the path of his pilgrimage through 
the gloomy gates of death, to where the 
heavens are forever blue and radiant ; and 
it is an abuse of scholarship when it is per- 
mitted to diminish the intensity, or to inter- 
rupt the continuity, of this spiritual and 
Divine fellowship. The refuge of the 
preacher is not in ignorance, nor in spe- 
cial pleading, nor in suspended judgment, 
but in the candid recognition of all doubt- 
ful and debatable questions, and in such a 
conception and estimate of the Bible that 



124 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

he can use it with ever-increasing facility 
and force, with the utmost assurance that 
the freest and most thorough scholarly re- 
search can only help in the end the cause 
of truth, whatever havoc it may make with 
traditional verdicts and judgments. 

I have tried, in this discussion, not to 
lose sight of the fact that I have been 
asked to lecture on preaching. I have re- 
sisted the temptation to make excursions 
into the field of dogmatics, and I have re- 
frained from an attempt to discuss the burn- 
ing questions of modern biblical criticism. 
I have simply reminded you that there is 
no agreement on the nature of inspiration, 
nor on the literary sources which the writers 
of the Scriptures used in their work. Not 
one of us is indifferent to these inquiries, 
but while they are being prosecuted, we 
must have a Bible which we can conscien- 
tiously use, or else manfully step down and 
out. 

Of course I speak of reverent and Chris- 
tian criticism. I leave wholly out of the 
account that school whose philosophical 
postulate is a denial of the supernatural, 
whose definition of the word " scientific " 
involves the impossibility of miracles, and 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 125 

who insist upon accounting for the history 
of the Jewish commonwealth and for the 
establishment of the Christian Church, as 
they would in tracing the events which led 
to the establishment of the American Re- 
public ; though, even in the latter case, the 
supernatural element emerges in the pro- 
found religious convictions which drove 
the Pilgrims from Scrooby to Leyden, and 
from Leyden across the waste of waters to 
Plymouth Rock. As Descartes insisted 
that absolute doubt involved the existence 
of the doubter, defying elimination by any 
process of dialectics, so it may be said that 
personality is itself the affirmation of the 
supernatural, and that even he who denies 
the existence of a personal God proves that 
the idea of the supernatural is a perfectly 
indigenous and familiar form of thought. 
It is a waste of time to argue with an athe- 
ist or a pantheist. The short method with 
such people is the direct appeal to the sense 
of personal dependence, and of personal ob- 
ligation. The only argument here is that 
of self-conviction ; and that can never fail, 
for the soul is eternally at war with any 
system which eliminates the ethical, and 



126 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

the ethical means a personal and righteous 
God. 

Nor have I sought for a common ground 
with those who reduce Christ to a myth, 
or who refuse to recognize His prophetic 
authority and redeeming energy. There 
can be no religion without a personal God, 
and there can be no Christianity without 
the Lord Jesus Christ. The personal reve- 
lation of God in Christ is assumed, not 
merely, nor even mainly, on the ground 
of historic evidence, but on the incontro- 
vertible ground of personal experience, in 
ever widening circles, and in ever deepen- 
ing intensity. The life of the world was 
never so full of the personal Christ as it 
is to-day. But this revelation of the per- 
sonal God in Jesus Christ, which is the 
supreme fact and the conquering energy 
of our time, is the only thing which I have 
postulated, and my contention is that this 
is the essential element in that long his- 
tory, whose broken and fragmentary records 
make up the Scriptures. That constitutes 
not only the unity of Moses, David, Isaiah, 
Paul, and John, but also the unity of the 
Bible and of our living Christianity. The 
broad and widening stream is thereby seen 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 127 

to be one with its original sources, traced 
to the origin of man. Therein lies the 
value of the Bible, and that must be the 
supreme canon of interpretation. God in 
Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, 
is its great theme. All other questions, 
whether dogmatic or critical, are subor- 
dinate, and may be ignored in your voca- 
tion as preachers of the Gospel. 

I am perfectly aware that all this is not 
new to you. You have gone all over this 
ground in the lecture-room. But the atmos- 
phere of the pulpit is not that of the library. 
You can read the story of Napoleon's wars, 
and study the maps of his campaigns, with- 
out palpitation of heart; but your face 
would blanch at the flash of sabres, and 
you would dodge the cannon-balls if you 
saw them speeding from the guns. To 
proclaim upon the housetops what has been 
whispered in the ear, requires moral cour- 
age. Still, that which gives a relief to 
you, you are bound to give to others. You 
may not, even by your silence, countenance 
a claim for the Bible, which claim every 
intelligent hearer knows to have been dis- 
credited by Christian scholarship. To do 
that will subject you to the charge, either of 



128 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

ignorance or of cowardice. You need not, 
you should not, make the pulpit the arena 
of debate upon questions in dispute ; you 
need not, you should not, pose as the ad- 
vocate of this or that theory of inspiration, 
of this or that school of critical inquiry ; 
but you can, and you ought to, use your 
Bible as the record of the revelation of 
God to men, and give men plainly to under- 
stand that this is the vital marrow of Scrip- 
ture, a living fact whose presence and power 
cannot be ignored, and which is wholly 
independent of either the lower or higher 
criticism. Let your hearers see, by your 
personal attitude, that they need not be 
perpetually dodging cannon-balls, accom- 
panied with smoke, and flash, and roar, 
that through the serried ranks of locked 
bayonets the real Bible sweeps onward to 
the conquest of the earth. Do not under- 
take to wear Saul's armor. Go forth with 
sling and pebble, as David did, when he 
answered the challenge of the proud Phil- 
istine. The simplest view of the Bible is 
the best, both for yourself and for your 
hearers. Its free and reverent handling 
will invest it with a power little dreamed 
of; so profound in its insight, so searching 



THE BIBLICAL ELEMENT. 129 

its disclosure of the secrets of personal 
unrest, and of national decadence, so true 
to life its description of the moral conflict 
which wages in every soul, so convincing 
its revelation of the character of God, so 
winning its p'ortraiture of Christ, so assur- 
ing and inspiring its promises and predic- 
tions. Bring men at once into the Holy 
of Holies, and they will forget the mer- 
chants and money-changers, the din of 
whose voices fills the outer courts. 

Of course, such a preaching of the Gos- 
pel takes for granted that the personal 
revelation of God in Jesus Christ has been 
verified for you in personal experience. 
The secret of the Lord must be in your 
possession. With it, the most meagre 
attainments in scholarship may make you 
a messenger of power; without it, the 
amplest literary equipment and the loftiest 
eloquence will leave your speech " as sound- 
ing brass, or a tinkling cymbal" 



THE SPIEITUAL ELEMENT IN 
PEEACHING. 



I purpose in the present lecture to fol- 
low up the hint so admirably phrased by 
the honored and mourned occupant of this 
chair for 1884, but which he reluctantly 
dismissed from thorough discussion, con- 
tenting himself with saying that "a ser- 
mon gets to be a sermon, and saves itself 
from being a lecture, by being made and 
delivered in the Holy Ghost." That ex- 
presses the exact truth, and I deeply regret 
that the man who could put the whole 
matter so tersely, did not address himself 
to its full exposition ; for a clear analysis 
of the elements of what is called spirit- 
uality, is of supreme importance both for 
the preacher and for the hearer. I had 
not read the sentence which I have quoted 
until long after I had marked out the plan 
of the present course, and had become 
130 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 131 

deeply absorbed in the theme on which I 
venture to speak ; but I heard in it a 
voice responding to my own convictions, 
and urging me to renewed and severer and 
prayerful reflection. That the preacher 
should be a spiritual man, and that every 
sermon should be saturated with the spirit- 
ual element, as the atmosphere is charged 
with moisture Unci light, will be at once 
admitted by every one; but the very 
promptness of the admission constitutes 
one of the difficulties of the discussion, as 
if the self-evidence of the proposition pro- 
vided also its definition. I shall, therefore, 
ask you, first, to consider what spiritu- 
ality is, and secondly, to inquire by what 
methods it may be cultivated and cher- 
ished. 

There is a vast deal of vague and un- 
satisfactory thought about the first ques- 
tion. 'Spirituality is frequently spoken of 
as if it consisted in a peculiar tempera- 
ment, the constitutional possession of a 
few, or as if it were a special, super- 
naturally imparted gift. A distinction is 
often made between that general opera- 
tion of the Holy Ghost, which issues in 
regeneration, assurance and sanctification, 



132 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

the universal heritage of all believers, and 
that special indwelling of the Spirit which 
constitutes a baptism, or an enduement 
with power. They are regarded as essen- 
tially distinct, as proceeding upon different 
conditions, moving in different planes, 
and designed for different ends. But 
when Paul describes the gifts of th6 Spirit, 
he not only makes them the manifesta- 
tions and the operations of a single 
energy, reducing all difference to one of 
degree, he also affirms that the law of 
distribution is a thoroughly rational and 
impartial one, determined not only by the 
personal sovereignty of the Holy Ghost, 
dividing to every man severally as He will, 
nor merely by the principle of grace or un- 
merited favor, but also graduated to the 
proportion of faith, "the receptive fac- 
ulty," as Alford says, " for all spiritual 
gifts." Sovereignty, grace, and the meas- 
ure of faith are co-ordinated, and must be 
regarded as interdependent and organically 
indivisible ; and in the measure or propor- 
tion of faith, personal responsibility and 
personal activity are most clearly affirmed. 
For while faith is the gift of God, it is also 
the universal duty and prerogative of man ; 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 133 

not an isolated or mechanical act, securing 
the gift of personal salvation, defined as 
trust in a person, but an habitual and 
elevated state or grace of the soul, its 
maturing power of spiritual perception, 
appropriation, and activity. Our business, 
therefore, concerns this personal attitude, 
the completeness of our voluntary subjec 
tion to faith ; for faith is the human condi- 
tion determining and limiting the distribu- 
tion of spiritual gifts. 

Now faith is defined, in its generic and 
essential being, as the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 
It deals with the invisible, and has an im- 
mutable conviction of the unseen as the 
eternal reality, which rational conviction 
urges to and secures moral conformity. 
Faith is contrasted with sight, never with 
knowledge. It is knowledge of the high- 
est order, reason apprehending the unveiled 
and eternal secrets of being, human and 
Divine, so true that in their clear and com- 
plete perception the moral law enacts itself 
with all its sanctions. The spiritual man 
is he who has the mind, the cfrpovrj/jLa of 
the Spirit, who cherishes the thoughts, the 
desires, and the aims of the Spirit, who 



134 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

views all things in God, who adopts the 
Divine estimates and purposes, who regards 
all that is from its invisible and eternal 
side, and who gladly, even eagerly, brings 
his own life into habitual conformity with 
the revelation. He is a seer, and he does 
not permit himself to be disobedient to the 
heavenly vision. Spirituality, then, is an 
intensely active state. It is rational and 
voluntary, a frame of mind which Paul 
makes the evidence of regeneration, when 
he declares that the mind of the Spirit is 
life and peace, and which he contrasts with 
the mind of the flesh, that carnal, sensu- 
ous, self-centred, and selfish way of think- 
ing and acting, against which every man 
is warned as sure to end in death. 

This rules out the notion that spirituality 
is the equivalent of ecstasy, a breaking 
through of the limits of conscious person- 
ality, a contemplative absorption, in which 
the reason is benumbed or paralyzed. This 
is mysticism, and mysticism is a pantheistic 
transformation of New Testament Christi- 
anity. It is the child of the Orient, whose 
heaven is Nirvana, and at an early day it 
began to influence Christian thought and 
worship. Against this error Paul entered 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 135 

his earnest protest in his correspondence 
with the Church of Corinth, warning them 
not to make the mistake of supposing that 
spiritual perceptions or experiences were 
unintelligible, either to the recipient or to 
the hearer. They spake with tongues, and 
in such a state of excitement, that when 
they sang, *or prayed, or exhorted, nobody 
could understand them; while the confu- 
sion was increased by several taking part 
at one and the same time. The apostle 
insisted that all this was wrong. He laid 
down the doctrine that God is the God of 
order, and that the spirits of the prophets 
are subject to the prophets, that the highest 
spiritual state is a conscious and voluntary 
one. He appealed to his own experience. 
He reminded his hearers, that he too had 
the gift of tongues, and in a more remark- 
able degree than they all, that he had been 
caught up to the third heaven, when he did 
not know whether he was in the body or 
out of the body, but that even then he saw 
and heard, the recipient of an intelligible 
and remembered revelation, which he did 
not feel at liberty to communicate ; and 
that when he sang or prayed, it was not 
only an act of the spirit, but also of the 



136 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

understanding. He recognizes no excep- 
tion to the rule that the spiritual state is 
always a conscious, intelligent, and intelli- 
gible one. It is the pagan notion of inspi- 
ration, that the deity mesmerizes the man, 
throws him into physical convulsions, in- 
duces epilepsy and mental vacuity, so that 
he does not know what he is doing or say- 
ing. Not such is Biblical inspiration, for the 
writers of the Bible knew what they meant 
to say, and to get at that meaning is our 
chief business as reverent students of the 
Word. Inspiration was not ecstasy, a Di- 
vine mesmerism ; and least of all is spirit- 
uality such a mood. 

Nor is spirituality, primarily or mainly, 
an emotional state, a condition of unusual , 
intensity of feeling, expressing itself in 
boisterous or pathetic speech. It is not a 
thing of tears and tones. The general law 
of the sensibility is that it is not under the 
direct control of the will. Its states are 
involuntary and necessary concomitants of 
perception and action, whether physical, 
mental, or moral. Some nerve must be 
touched and jarred before there can be 
pain, and then the pain comes without 
your consent, nor can it be dismissed at 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 137 

your option. You cannot make yourself 
hungry or thirsty whenever you choose, 
nor can you quiet the empty stomach and 
cool the fever of parched lips by a com- 
mand. Whether you shall have a bitter or 
a sweet taste in your mouth, depends upon 
your taking a lump of sugar or a quinine 
pill. From a pleasant dream you wake 
refreshed and sunny ; from a horrible one 
you wake exhausted and trembling. Good 
news makes you happy; bad news fills 
you with alarm. Bright thoughts make 
your face shine ; gloomy thoughts make 
the countenance sad ; bitter thoughts create 
a scowl. Love and hate are the reflex in 
sensibility of the action of reason and will. 
You can learn to love those whom once you 
hated, by studying them more carefully, 
judging them more impartially, by becom- 
ing better acquainted with them ; and the 
same process may change your attachment 
into aversion. The emotion changes under 
the new estimate which prolonged atten- 
tion creates. If that attention, which is 
only reason held to its task by the will, 
discloses some element of good behind the 
most repulsive wrappings, love will come 
to its birth. 



138 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

Not otherwise is the love for God waked 
in human hearts. It comes through the 
revelation of what God is and does, by 
the apprehension of His veracity and in- 
finite goodness. The will compels the 
soul to look and listen, to hear and heed 
the revelation; and when this result has 
been secured, the emotions of peace and 
joy bring their sunshine and their song 
into life. So far as the process of con- 
version can be traced, it begins in the 
will as compelling attention, and it is com- 
pleted in the gradual clearing away of mis- 
apprehensions, in the emergence of right 
ethical perceptions and judgments, in an 
intelligent, unprejudiced view of self, and- 
of God's attitude towards man in Jesus 
Christ. Repentance is simply change of 
mind, induced by serious and prolonged 
attention, which attention becomes a fixed 
voluntary mental habit, and the convic- 
tions thus formed become the formative 
elements of the regenerated character and 
conduct. The new mental perceptions, 
changed through the will into the organic 
law of moral life, evoke, by necessary 
reflex action, the appropriate emotions of 
penitence, peace, hope, joy, and love. So 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT 139 

that the Scriptural injunction is as pro- 
foundly philosophical as it is practical, 
"whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are honest, whatsoever things are 
just, whatsoever things are pure, whatso- 
ever things are lovely, whatsoever things 
are of good report ; if there be any praise, 
think on these things." The emphasis is 
on the rational, not on the emotional; if 
men will only think upon the right things, 
the things that are true and fair and pure, 
with an intensity and continuity that shall 
make every rational perception a law to 
the moral nature,, and a principle of per- 
sonal conduct, the appropriate feelings will 
come of themselves, as perfume exhales 
from flowers. 

There are many who sneer at doctrinal 
preaching, who tell us that intellectualism 
in religion is cold and chilling, and that 
the true sphere of Christian experience is 
in the sensibilities. Matthew Arnold's fa- 
mous phrase that religion is "morality 
touched with emotion," expresses this 
phase of modern religious philosophy. Re- 
ligion is viewed as the poetry and sentiment 
of practical life. In the biblical conception, 
it is not emotion which transfigures moral- 



140 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

ity into religion, but the open vision of the 
living God, the profound and habitual 
conviction of His presence, His moral ma- 
jesty, and His eternal compassion. Men 
are changed into the image of Christ by 
the Spirit of the Lord, through that fixed 
attention which reveals, and in revealing 
imparts, the spiritual glory of the Son of 
God. The process is voluntary and rational, 
not emotional. Let practical morality be 
moved by the thought of what God is, as 
revealed in Jesus Christ, and it will become , 
Divine. The earthly, the sensual, the sel- 
fish, will drop away, as dead leaves fall be- 
fore the push of swelling buds. And the 
fountains of the deep will be broken up. 
There will be tears and laughter, trembling 
and hope, shame and exultant joy. Great 
thoughts are what Herder called for, when 
he lay dying; and great thoughts are the 
bread which men must eat if they are to 
become sinewy and strong, with the flush 
of health upon the cheek. 

A rational religion cannot be passionless. 
To look upon the things that are invisible, 
to have an abiding personal conviction of 
their reality and their eternal majesty, can- 
not leave a man icy and inactive. It will 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT 141 

make every nerve in him quiver, every drop 
of blood in his veins boil. The vision will 
evoke the passion. Let a man drift down 
the Niagara River, with hands folded, and 
half asleep, until the warning roar of the 
cataract rouses him and makes him atten- 
tive. What makes him seize the oars, and 
bend to his work, until every muscle is at 
its utmost strain, and the breath comes hot 
and quick from his lips ? He has seen the 
impending danger, and he has heard the 
angry tones of the abyss. Should he suc- 
ceed in gaining the shore, or make the aw- 
ful plunge without loss of life, no one would 
need to tell him to rejoice. The danger 
would be that the necessary reaction in the 
sensibility would throw him into a swoon, 
if it did not paralyze the action of the 
heart. Neither can any man have a vivid 
conception of what God is, in His holiness 
and grace, in His majesty and power, in 
His infinity and eternity, without experi- 
encing the correspondent emotions of alarm, 
of remorse, of penitence, of despair, of hope, 
of joy. What the feelings shall be will 
depend upon the attitude which the will 
assumes to the disclosure. The thought 
which is real and vital to the soul, before 



142 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

whose authority the will bows, and to 
which it compels obedience, cannot main- 
tain its place and do its work without 
rousing the sensibilities, any more than a 
bar of red-hot iron can be applied to your 
flesh without provoking a cry of pain. 
You can play at thinking, give yourself 
up to intellectual amusement, and learn to 
laugh when you deal with the most awful 
themes ; but then you do not really believe 
or see them, they have not become eternal 
realities to you. When thought does be- 
come vital, and when your will locks arms 
with your conviction, you will have all the 
feeling you can take care of. " Meditate 
on these things " was the great apostle's 
parting word to Timothy, " give thyself 
wholly to them, that thy profiting may 
appear to all " ; an excellent rule for the 
individual Christian, and for the Christian 
preacher. 

That the feelings are not directly under 
our control, and should not form the bur- 
den of our immediate anxiety, is plain also 
when you consider another fact of great 
importance. One emotion may be crowded 
out by another and an opposite one. You 
can become unconscious of hunger, weari- 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 143 

ness, and even acute pain, by complete ab- 
sorption in something else. You may not 
be able to eat while your thought is brood- 
ing, and you may be insensible to great 
physical discomfort. A great joy, or an 
overwhelming sorrow, takes away your ap- 
petite. A sudden danger makes you care- 
less of appearances. Sleep forsakes you 
when the sick demand your attention. 
Fear vanishes when a great crisis is upon 
you. The lower emotion retreats before 
the higher. But how ? You do not deal 
directly with your feelings ; something 
comes in to change the direction of your 
thoughts, until by attention they are di- 
verted and riveted, and as these new 
thoughts master you, the feelings change 
without effort on your part. Now, this 
fact is of the highest practical impor- 
tance. If you want to change your own 
feelings, or the feelings of others, there 
must be a change in the thoughts ; you 
must give to the mental vision a different 
direction. 

I might tarry here to show that this sim- 
ple rule provides you with a principle of 
the highest order for your pastoral duties, 
in your treatment of inquirers, in your 



144 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

visits to the sick, in your converse with 
the bereaved and the despondent. You 
must honor the law of expulsion, and you 
must expel by the earnest use of other 
thoughts, until you have induced a healthy 
mental vision. But this is not my present 
purpose ; and a hint is, perhaps, all that is 
needed here. I am trying to make it clear 
that spirituality is not an emotional state, 
as the emotions are not directly under our 
control, and cannot therefore be regarded 
as moral or spiritual per se; and that a 
higher emotion can displace a lower one 
only by the introduction of another and 
intenser thought. The lions in the way 
filled Christian with alarm, until he saw 
that they were chained, and then he marched 
between them singing. The valley of shad- 
ows did not affright David, because he 
knew that the Divine shepherd was with 
him. It was under the power of a rational 
judgment that Paul sacrificed the world 
for Christ. There was not a particle of 
sentiment in his decision, and in his adher- 
ence to it. He looked at his stripes and 
scars as medals of honor, stamped into his 
frail and mortal bod) r . To die was to fin- 
ish his ministry with joy, and then to be 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 145 

forever with his Lord. He never whined. 
There is no "holy tone" in his epistles, 
and there could have been none in his 
speech. He rejoiced in tribulation, be- 
cause it brought glory. He apologized 
for referring to his sufferings and his ex- 
alted privileges, as if ashamed of institut- 
ing any comparison between himself and 
other men, or of calling attention to what 
was purely personal to himself. He did 
not ask for pity when he lay in a dungeon 
and anticipated martyrdom ; he wanted to 
be congratulated, and he was always joy- 
ful himself. Now, this was not a matter 
of temperament with him, nor were his 
courage and hope miraculously imparted 
and sustained; it was the inevitable emo- 
tional result of his way of looking at things. 
He, like Moses, endured as seeing Him who 
is invisible ; and such rational perception 
of the eternal is always and everywhere 
the essence of heroism. He who walks 
with God is mighty, and will hush men 
into awe. 

The apostle himself defines spirituality, 
when he speaks of it, as "the spirit of 
power, of love, and of a sound mind." 
The statement is anti-climactic. It in- 



146 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

eludes the will, the emotions, and the rea- 
son ; but the mood has its rise in mental 
sanity, produces love, and issues in moral 
energy. The first thing is soundness of 
mind, looking at things as they really are, 
and at all things in their ordered and eter- 
nal unity. Spirituality is simply downright 
common sense. I do not even say " sanc- 
tified " common sense, for unsanctified com- 
mon sense is the baldest nonsense. " Be 
spiritual " is only another way of saying, 
"Be sensible," for the man is a fool who 
never thinks of his immortal soul, and 
who puts God out of his thoughts. 

It accords with this that the common 
designation of the Holy Spirit is the 
"Spirit of Truth." He convicts men of 
sin, righteousness, and judgment. He 
takes of the things of Christ, and reveals 
them unto us. He brings them to our 
remembrance. He regenerates and sanc- 
tifies men through the truth. He moves 
the heart by enlightening the understand- 
ing. He opens our eyes and unstops our 
ears ; and when once the soul has seen the 
glory of the Lord, responding to it by a 
prompt obedience, the lips break forth in 
song, and the life will be transfigured. 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 147 

The sword of the Spirit is the Word of 
God, His revealed and living thought, 
piercing to the marrow, dissecting soul and 
spirit, discerning the thoughts and intents 
of the heart. The spiritually minded man 
is he who accepts the judgment resulting 
from this comparison, and who gives to 
the revealed thought of God the sole, and 
continuous, and comprehensive supremacy 
over himself. This is the (j>povrnia rod irvev- 
fjLaTos in which every sermon should be 
made and preached, and without which 
it is not a sermon at all. It includes a 
rational, an emotional, and a voluntary 
element ; for all these are involved in the 
word which Paul uses ; but, as we have 
seen, the emotional quality comes in by 
reflex action, while the rational and the 
voluntary features are the ones with which 
we are summoned actively and energeti- 
cally to deal. Spirituality is the fixed and 
obedient mental habit of piercing to that 
which is essential, universal, and eternal. 

Now, the invisible universe, so far as 
we have any knowledge of it, is consti- 
tuted by two factors, and only two, — God 
and the soul. Everything else resolves 
itself into the interpretation and the rela- 



148 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

tion of these two personal subsistences. 
Law and government, whether human 
or Divine, are not separate entities ; they 
inhere and are identical with the living 
thoughts of God or of man. They are 
what they are, simply because God and 
man are what they are. They could not 
be other than they are, nor can they ever 
suffer change, simply because God is what 
He is by an eternal, voluntary, moral ne- 
cessity, and because He made man in his 
image. The task of spirituality in preach- 
ing, then, is this, to estimate the soul as 
it really is, and to estimate God as He 
really is. 

And who are you, and who are they to 
whom you speak ? What is man ? You may 
define him by the physical element of his nat- 
ure, whose powers are insignificant, whose 
days are an handbreadth, whose achieve- 
ments are vanity. You may define him in 
the terms of his moral consciousness, under 
the dominion of sin and guilt, restless in 
his bondage, yet hopelessly enslaved. But 
in all this you have not reached the living 
thought of God. You are more than all 
this, though you might never have dreamed 
of it had it not been revealed to you. You 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT 149 

are a child of God. You are a temple in 
ruins ; but, as John Howe says, you are a 
temple still ; or as Horace Bushnell says, 
there is an awful dignity in your degrada- 
tion even. If you are honest and fearless 
with yourself, you will be habitually peni- 
tent and contrite, in view of jovly repeated 
failures and shortcomings ; broken in heart, 
contrite in spirit, because you are so great 
a sinner, falling so far short of what you 
ought to be. You will never outgrow the 
fifty-first Psalm. You can never become 
proud and self-conceited, nor rest content 
with your best work. You will never over- 
take either your personal or your profes- 
sional ideal. You may not burn last 
year's sermons, but you will not preach 
them a second time, until they have been 
born again in the travail of j^our better 
thought. But you will advance beyond this 
estimate of your conscious moral imper- 
fection and immaturity. There will come 
to you also the thought that the prodi- 
gal son, ragged, hungry, and disgraced, 
is a son still. This is the transfiguring 
touch upon our self-knowledge. You have 
looked into your own mirror, and have 
seen an immortal soul under the power of 



150 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

sin. Now, look into your genealogy, and 
into the face of Jesus Christ. God has 
never surrendered, not qualified in the 
least His paternal claim upon you, and 
there is not one of you whom He is will- 
ing to lose. There is a place in His heart 
and in heaven for you ; and it will be for- 
ever empty, if you do not come back to 
fill it. " Beloved, now are we the sons of 
God," is the repeated refrain of John, in 
gospel and epistle, the silver bugle-note to 
which his every thought marches; and 
that will lift you to the highest heavens. 
Think of yourself in that way, and pov- 
erty will lose its sting, any sphere of ser- 
vice will be great, whether on the frontier 
or in the metropolis, whether among the 
cultured or the savage, powers will be 
consecrated and grow lustrous, obscurity 
will be radiant, fame will shine with a 
supernal glory, grief will have its mighty 
consolation, life will be an unending song, 
and death will be the open gate to your 
Father's house. 

And remember, what you are, as thus 
read in the light of God's living thought, 
everybody else is — the beggar, the out- 
cast, the millionnaire, the laborer, the white 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 151 

man, and the black man. All men are 
made in the Divine image. All men are 
dear to God. All men are redeemed in 
Christ. There is no monopoly in the Di- 
vine adoption; for the blood of Adam 
courses in all veins, and the blood of Jesus 
Christ is the seal of a universal reconcilia- 
tion. Now this way of estimating man is 
the spiritual way, because it fixes attention 
upon the invisible and essential kernel of 
being; and that is the only rational pro- 
cedure. Under such an estimate you will 
respect and love all men, however ignorant 
and debased they may have become ; and 
you will not cease to pray for them, and 
labor with them, until they are withdrawn 
from earth. For upon this estimate, there 
must always remain an infinite chasm be- 
tween the most abandoned man or woman, 
and a brute. It is this perception which 
distinguishes the Christian civilization from 
all preceding and contemporaneous ones. 
It was a theatrical flourish, when Terence 
cried out, " Nothing human I count foreign 
to myself " ; a hollow mockery of senti- 
ment, when you recall the frightful scenes 
of the gladiatorial contests, and read of the 
cold-blooded butcheries of the Coliseum. 



152 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

The thought was not a vital and vitalizing 
one. There was no regard for human life, 
no respect for woman, no pity for children, 
no compassion for the slave. The infinite 
value of the human soul in the sight of 
God, it has well been said, came upon the 
thoughts of men like a new and startling 
revelation ; and its leavening power is yet 
far from having done its mighty work. It 
is the hardest practical thing for you and 
me to do, to estimate men by what they 
are as immortal and moral beings, infinitely 
dear to God, and to treat them accordingly. 
But that is the foremost sign and evidence 
of spiritual-mindedness. It will make you 
tender and solicitous. It will make you 
brave and impartial. It will make you dem- 
ocratic. It will make you cosmopolitan, 
with a hand for every man, and a heart for 
all the world. It will make your preaching 
spiritual because it will reflect the mind of 
the Holy Spirit, and so be eternally true. 

It has not escaped you, I am sure, that 
I have not been able to speak of the esti- 
mate of man as our point of departure, 
from which we should proceed to the mak- 
ing and delivery of every sermon, without 
passing over to the view of God which 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 153 

should shape our conscious and habitual 
thought. I have transcended the testi- 
mony of natural psychology in affirming 
that man is made in the image of God, 
and that he is the child of God, and in in- 
sisting that this is the only rational stan- 
dard of valuation for ourselves and for 
others. I have assumed a revelation of 
God in defining what man is ; I have put 
my theology into my anthropology. For 
sonship involves fatherhood, and the filial 
dignity can be measured only by the pater- 
nal rank and provision. But this was in- 
evitable ; for the whole truth is not stated 
when we say that our conceptions of what 
God is must be necessarily anthropomor- 
phic in their content and expression : it is 
also true, and it is the deeper truth, that 
our conceptions of what man is, must, in 
order to be exact and complete, be theo- 
morphic. Man must be viewed in God, 
that is, in the light of God's eternal, living 
thought, which is inseparable from his 
essential being. For what God is, deter- 
mines what man, created in His image, is 
by original vocation, what he ought to be, 
and what he may become ; and what God 
is, discloses what His thoughts and pur- 



154 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

poses must be concerning man. So that 
the knowledge of God has priority, in the 
logical order, over the knowledge of man ; 
but in the chronological or experimental 
order, the relation is reversed. For the 
knowledge of God, which is eternal life, 
is not the precipitate of deductive logic, 
starting from some metaphysical concep- 
tion of Him, implicitly lodged in the ra- 
tional intuition of the soul. It is the fruit 
of inductive reasoning, based upon the facts 
of a historical revelation, reaching its ma- 
turity in the person and ministry of our 
Lord. He reveals the Father, and in so 
doing He interprets man's place and gra- 
cious prerogative. 

I shall have more to say of this farther 
on ; at the present I wish only to empha- 
size the thought that what God is, deter- 
mines the mind of the spirit, or the spirit- 
uality of the preacher. His mental tone 
and temper will be shaped by his living 
thought of God. There is no department 
of dogmatics where he needs to exercise 
greater care, where he requires greater 
accuracy, docility, and comprehensiveness, 
than in forming his doctrine of God. A 
partial view, or a distorted one, in which 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 155 

the scripturally historical perspective is 
not jealously maintained, will vitiate all 
his mental processes and his spoken words. 
He must prepare himself to give to every 
revelation which God has made of Himself, 
its natural and unqualified force, even if 
he should find it impossible to combine 
them all into a perfectly coherent unity. 
It may be that the Divine majesty, its bal- 
anced and rounded moral perfection, while 
it was incarnated in a human life, cannot 
be reproduced in mental concepts, nor pho- 
tographed in the speech of man. The point 
of supreme importance is that God be rec- 
ognized as the Living One, the Subjec of 
conscious, voluntary movement in thought, 
emotion, and action. His Being may be so 
construed as to eliminate the reality of 
all human personality, and to recognize in 
second causes only a nominal energy ; and 
it will make little difference whether this 
pervasive and exclusive presence be defined 
in terms of substance, as Spinoza does, or 
in terms of thought, as Hegel does, or 
in terms of will, as Jonathan Edwards 
does, an unethical fatalism will be the re- 
sult ; and a kind of speechless awe will 
characterize the resultant piety. The glory 



156 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

of God will be regarded as the final cause 
of all things, to be secured and displayed 
at any cost, giving no account of itself to 
angel or man ; and I do not see how any 
man can avoid feeling sometimes, that such 
a God, while commanding unselfishness — 
is supremely selfish Himself. 

But this is the God of metaphysical 
theology, which makes Will in God pri- 
mary, inclusive, and sovereign. Such a 
God is a speculative fiction; He is not 
the God who reveals Himself in the his- 
tory of the world, in the record of Scrip- 
ture, and in the face of Jesus Christ. 
These media disclose a sovereignty which 
has given reality to second causes, to the 
life of created reason, and to moral re- 
sponsibility in man, and which is infinitely 
sensitive and conscientious in maintaining 
and guarding what it has called into exis- 
tence. The immanence is such that it 
eliminates neither the Divine personal tran- 
scendence, nor the full reality and respon- 
sibility of the dependent creature. "In 
Him we live, and move, and have our 
being " ; but in that interpenetration there 
is a Him, and there is a We; the per- 
sonal distinctions are rigorously conserved. 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 157 

That fact is of infinitely greater practical 
importance for us than a speculative theory 
of the nexus between God and the world. 
An inductive logic compels us to rest in 
theological dualism, just as Ave are forced 
to recognize a natural dualism in an induc- 
tive philosophy of perception. Theological 
determinism is open to the same objections 
which lie against philosophical idealism; 
it does not deal honestly with the facts, 
and the logical process is deductive, not 
inductive. The facts reveal a God who, 
while Sovereign, does not regard the cre- 
ated universe as a shadow, nor use men as 
machines. Freedom is a real thing, not 
merely formal ; and even God does not in- 
vade its prerogatives. He does not choose 
for me, nor does He, in any strict sense, 
choose in me. In a word, He is the Liv- 
ing God, alive to what is due to Himself, 
alive to what is due to everything that He 
has made, promoting His glory by promot- 
ing the highest well-being of the universe. 
The doctrine of the Divine immutability 
supplies another instance in which a deduc- 
tive logic has thrust the living God prac- 
tically out of sight. His unchangeableness 
has been conceived as erasing all distinc- 



158 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

tions in time, in thought, in emotion, and 
in action. He, we are told, dwells in an 
eternal Now ; with Him there is no past, 
and no future. Strictly speaking, it has 
been urged, there can be no conscious suc- 
cession of thought in God, no real change 
in His feelings, no separate and succes- 
sive volitions. The whole conscious life 
of Deity is interpreted " sub specie eterni- 
tatis," in which succession and change can 
form no conceivable part. The past, the 
present, and the future, are represented as 
held in the grasp of a single thought ; all 
separate volitions as merged in a single, 
eternal act of the will ; and no varying 
emotional states are recognized as having 
anything more than an apparent, anthro- 
pomorphic reality. 

You may call such a Being the Living, 
Personal God; but it is difficult to see 
how such an activity differs from an eter- 
nal and hopeless quiescence. I am free to 
say, that to my way of thinking, an eter- 
nal Now, as that phrase is theologically 
used, is eternal nonsense. It is a pure 
assumption that omniscience destroys the 
differences between memory, present per- 
ception, and prevision. It is a pure as- 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT, 159 

sumption that unity of thought eliminates 
separateness and succession in conscious 
thinking. It is a pure assumption that 
unity of will resolves all separate voli- 
tions into a figure of speech. It is a pure 
assumption that the ethical blessedness of 
God makes it impossible for Him to be the 
subject of emotional change, to pass from 
wrath to pity, and from pity to love, and 
from love to indignation. And all this is 
squarely in the teeth of all that God has 
said, through the records of Scripture, and 
by the words of Jesus Christ. He speaks 
of Himself as grieving over sin, as plead- 
ing with men, as roused to judgment, as 
hearing and answering prayer, as remem- 
bering His covenant, as preparing the way 
for future displays of power and grace. 
He is never surprised, nor is He ever out- 
witted. Foreordination is eternal and in- 
clusive ; but that does not destroy the 
distinction between what God remembers 
as past, and what He sees as present, and 
what He knows as future. The separate 
and successive Divine volitions are co- 
ordinated in the eternal will, — not one of 
them is arbitrary, revolutionary, disturbing 
the vital unity of His holy purpose, — but 



160 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

that does not destroy the difference, in the 
Divine consciousness, between what God 
has done, and is now doing, and will do 
hereafter. The will, like the thought of 
God, is in living, conscious movement. 
Change and succession are in them, as well 
as unity. 

Nor is it otherwise with the emotional 
life of God, when scripturally interpreted. 
There is pain in His blessedness. Sin 
rouses His indignation, and the perception 
of penitence, as with us, wakes in Him the 
sense of gladness and provokes His instant 
approval. A rational ethical unity under- 
lies and pervades all this, but the unity 
only gives eternal validity to the change 
which comes to the heart of God, when 
the sinner becomes a penitent. All this is 
as clear as noonday when what God says 
about Himself is allowed its natural force ; 
and I need not stop to show how such a 
perception of God makes Him intensely 
real, in vital contact with the soul of man. 

But the most important thing yet remains 
to be said. Nothing is more indispensable 
for the spiritual life of the preacher, and 
for the spiritual power of his preaching, 
than a firm grasp upon the ethical unity 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 161 

of God's nature, and so upon the ethical 
unity of His moral government. Here 
the great battle has been between the 
justice and the mercy of God, between 
His holiness and His grace. The atone- 
ment has been represented as their eternal 
reconciliation, or as an economic compro- 
mise between their conflicting claims, as if 
God were doing the best He CQuld to pay 
His own debts, or paying no more than 
was actually necessary. Whether it is so 
intended or not, such a representation 
makes God in painful conflict with Him- 
self, and destroys the unity of his ethical 
life. Then, again, the justice of God has 
been made central, and love has been 
remanded to a subordinate place, as in 
the Westminster Confession, and in the 
Calvinistic theology generally. Grace has 
been limited to the elect, and election has 
been supposed to embody an eternal, sov- 
ereign, unconditional decree. Explain it 
as you will, the sober, plain Christian 
judgment pronounces such a doctrine hard, 
cruel, irrational, immoral, and blasphemous. 
It is an outrage on man, and an insult to 
God ; and agitation will not cease until in 
all the symbols the love of God is given 



162 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

an equal place with His justice, instead 
of being crowded into a preliminary and 
introductory definition ; until the ethical 
unity of the Divine nature gets its full 
recognition, in which his justice is his 
mercy, and his grace is his holiness. 

And finally, the ethical unity of the 
Divine nature and government has been 
sacrificed in the theory of probation, 
whose logical outcome is its extension 
beyond death until every soul has faced 
the " historic Christ." The antediluvians 
were not fairly treated, if this theory is 
true ; the patriarchs had an exceedingly 
hard time of it ; the millions of the heathen 
have been cruelly neglected of God, though 
we hope that He will settle His account 
with them by and by to their satisfaction ; 
only a very insignificant part of the human 
race has been treated in moral equity, 
though between this and the final judg- 
ment God will correct all the blunders of 
His past and present administration. But 
who has authority to say that righteousness 
and grace are thus held in practical sus- 
pense, and relegated to the unknown fut- 
ure ? If all this issues from the doctrine 
of mortal probation, then for one, I will 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 163 

eliminate it as an Arminian heresy from 
my dogmatic system, rather than destroy 
the ethical unity of God's character, and 
deny the fact of a present and universal 
order of righteousness in human history. 

I want a present and living God, a God 
who puts His whole ethical being into every 
moment of time, who deals with every 
soul, infant and adult, Christian and pa- 
gan, in Jesus Christ ; though I may not be 
able to make manifest to my reason this 
immanent and universal blending of right- 
eousness and grace. I appeal to the Scrip- 
tures, and to the natural force of their 
language, that God is neither an omnipo- 
tent and exclusive energy, nor a mechan- 
ically immutable and unemotional entity, 
nor an arbitrary and partial Sovereign, nor 
a being in whom ethical unity is a figment, 
of whom the organic balance and living 
co-operation of moral qualities can be 
affirmed only as a transcendental fact, and 
who deals with men on purely arbitrary 
principles, suspending a present, moral 
equity of administration for a future im- 
partial treatment ; but the " Father " from 
the beginning, and the Father of all men. 
This is the last and inclusive word in the 



164 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

self-revelation of God to men, and he who 
contents himself with anything less, robs 
himself of what the best thought of God 
can give him, and so far forth he fails of 
conveying the full spiritual power of his 
message. For this is the mind of the 
Holy Spirit, that it hath pleased the 
Father, by the blood of the cross, to rec- 
oncile all things unto Himself ; and if the 
history of redemption is the fulfilment of 
an eternal purpose, the vital unfolding of 
the eternal thought of God, then you have 
no right to think of God in any other way. 
Fatherhood constitutes the final and inclu- 
sive definition of His nature, and of His 
government. The law which commands 
and exacts holiness is paternal legislation. 
The severest judgments are the warnings 
and the punishments of a Father. His 
pity and His patience are paternal in their 
quality, scope, and continuance. True, it 
is an ethical Fatherhood, uniting holiness 
and love ; but it is a Fatherhood, not an 
ethical, imperial sovereignty, or merely 
moral governorship. The paternal con- 
ception of God does not ignore the ethical 
element of holy authority, but transfigures 
it under the higher thought of an infinite, 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 165 

universal, absolutely unselfish love; and, 
in so doing, it legitimates that estimate of 
man which has already commanded our 
attention. The rational, voluntary, and 
joyful recognition of these organically re- 
lated estimates of what man is, and what 
God is, constitutes the essence of spiritual- 
mindedness, and every sermon issuing 
from such an habitual mental and moral 
temper will be made in the Holy Ghost, 
and will be preached in the demonstration 
of the Spirit, and in power. For the Word 
of God is only then preached, when it con- 
veys the Father's message to His blind and 
wayward and guilty children. 

A consideration of the methods by which 
spirituality may be cultivated and cher- 
ished, is a matter of too serious moment 
to be overlooked, and too important to be 
despatched in a few sentences. I shall, 
therefore, resume the discussion at this 
point in the next lecture. 



II. 



In defining spirituality as a fixed mental 
and moral habit, to be carefully distin- 
guished from ecstasy or from emotional 
excitement, having its rational ground in 
the clear discernment of what God and 
man are in their essential nature, and in 
their mutual relations, and its ethical 
quality in the voluntary and habitual sub- 
jection of the conscious and active life to 
the judgments which such discernment 
forms, I have propounded no theory of my 
own. I have simply given to the language 
of Scripture its natural force. Spirituality 
is, in the carefully selected phraseology of 
Paul, cf>p6v7]/jba rod TrvevfJLaros, the mind of 
the spirit. The word ^povrjiia has no 
exact English equivalent. It is not sy- 
nonymous with vovs, the equivalent of our 
word understanding or reason, the faculty 
of rational perception and judgment. Our 
166 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 167 

nearest approach to such a use of the word 
"mind" as makes it reflect the meaning 
of (f)p6v7)fjLa is in the frequent popular say- 
ing, "I have a great mind to do this or 
that," a phrase which not only expresses 
a rational judgment, but also announces 
an intention, ^povrj/xa is derived from 
the root (fyprjv, which, literally, means 
" diaphragm," the muscle which separates 
the heart and the lungs from the lower 
viscera, and so it became descriptive of all 
the organs clustering around the heart, 
which together constitute the seat of phys- 
ical life. By a natural transition it was 
carried up to describe the interior consti- 
tution of the invisible and conscious self, 
the sum total of the soul's rational, emo- 
tional and volitional powders, the organ of 
grief, love, anger, and courage, of mental 
perception and thought, of will and pur- 
pose. It is the man in the centre of his 
personality, stripped of all that is seeming 
and accidental. The "mind" in you is 
what you are, in your thoughts, desires, 
and aims. Not all the thoughts which 
you have belong to your mind, but only 
such thoughts as are intensely vital, stir- 
ring your deepest emotions and impelling 



168 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

you to action. Not all that you feel 
belongs to your mind, but only such emo- 
tions as spring out of your thoughts and 
shape your conduct. Not everything that 
you do shows what your mind is, but only 
such actions as are the outcome of rational 
conviction and genuine love. The " mind " 
of a man, is what he is, in the organic 
unity of his secret thoughts, affections, and 
aims. He has the mind of the flesh, if the 
gravitation of his inmost self is towards 
the things of the flesh, the things that 
minister to selfish ease and ambition, no 
matter how refined his pursuits and habits 
may be. The carnally minded man is not 
necessarily a coarse man. He need not be 
a glutton, or a drunkard, or a debauchee. 
He may be a man of blameless reputation. 
But he is, everywhere and always, selfish, 
self-centred, and self-seeking, with his eye 
on the main chance, taking care of number 
one, an altruistic egoist if he gives any 
thought to his neighbor, counting nothing 
real which does not bring present and 
tangible advantage. And to be spiritually 
minded is to have the thoughts, the desires, 
and the aims of the spirit, to survey and 
measure all things from the centre of the 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 169 

invisible and the eternal, judging yourself 
as God judges you, treating your fellow- 
men as God would have you treat them, 
estimating life as God estimates it, honor- 
ing God as He deserves to be honored. 

A curious illustration of the vagueness 
which encompasses this important question 
of spirituality, the mental fog in which 
many preachers labor when they venture 
to give definite outline to their thought 
upon it, has recently fallen under my eye 
in a report of an elaborate sermon, preached 
by one of our city pastors. The concord- 
ance had been freely and faithfully used. 
There were Scriptural quotations in abun- 
dance, and these gave a decidedly evangeli- 
cal flavor to the discourse. There was a 
certain rude logical order in the arrange- 
ment of the biblical material, but it was 
purely verbal, and of a real analysis there 
was not the slightest trace. The only 
approach to a real discernment of the 
problem was in the hint, now and then 
.obtruded, that spirituality was the reverse 
of ceremonialism in worship and conduct ; 
but it was evident that such interjected 
phrases were little more than the mechan- 
ical repetition of current platitudes of 



170 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

speech, and that their real significance had 
not become clearly outlined to the preach- 
er's mind. The sermon bore the marks of 
faithful, painstaking work. The tone was 
modest and quiet; there was no attempt 
at theoretical display ; and it was evidently 
the work of an earnest and devout man ; 
but it left the hearer just where it found 
him, with a mass of biblical texts, not one 
of which had been compelled to yield its 
mighty secret. It was unutterably lifeless 
and dull, for the simple reason that it was 
unintelligible. It lacked definite mental 
perception, and, therefore, ended in mental 
cloudiness and confusion. Much was said 
about being " filled with the Spirit," but 
the phrase touched no living chord; it had 
a mystical ring, as descriptive of some 
strange, supernatural or miraculous opera- 
tion, in which the soul is passive, and 
which defies explanation and expression. 
It may seem to you a hard and narrow 
rule, but it is an eminently practical and 
salutary one for the preacher, as I believe 
it to be inexorably universal, that what is 
true is always intelligible, that revelation 
is unveiling, not mystification, and that 
the time of the sermon is worse than 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 171 

wasted, unless the message is so phrased 
that every man can understand it. 

There is nothing shadowy or mystical 
in the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and 
in the resultant spirituality of life. It is 
an intelligent and intelligible state. It is 
conscious and voluntary. The preacher to 
whom I have referred might have made 
his sermon luminous and searching by sim- 
ply inquiring what ceremonialism in wor- 
ship was. It is membership in the visible 
church, observance of the Sabbath, sub- 
scription to a creed, a reverent posture in 
prayer, a decent behavior among men, the 
regular and reverent participation in ordi- 
nances. It is devotion to externals! It is 
contentment with forms. It is regard for 
appearances. In or out of the church, that 
is Pharisaism, the mind of the flesh, giv- 
ing no true liberty, and cursing the soul 
with drought and increasing impotence. 
It is living in the realm of the seen and the 
temporal. And what is the opposite of 
ceremonialism ? It is the worship of God 
in spirit and truth, the converse which is 
the natural and habitual outcome of a clear 
knowledge of what God is and of what 
you are, the conscious and mutual ex- 



172 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

change of thought between an erring, 
needy, penitent child and its Holy, Loving 
Father, who is in heaven. In or out of 
the church, that is spirituality, the fixed 
habit of dealing with invisible and eternal 
realities. To be filled with the Spirit is 
simply to be under the dominance of those 
convictions which give reality to God and 
the soul, as the two sole factors by which 
the universe is constituted, and by which 
time and eternity are shaped. For when 
the heavens and the earth pass away, God 
remains and the soul abides. The reason 
and the will are the sphere of the Divine 
impact and indwelling ; these are not mys- 
tical, but dynamic, and they are dynamic 
by illumination of the understanding and 
by securing voluntary obedience to the 
revelation. To be filled with the Spirit is 
the same thing as being guided by the 
Spirit into all truth ; it is to see things as 
they really are, and to act in accordance 
with that vision. Spirituality, therefore, 
is a rational and voluntary state. It begins 
with mental sanity, piercing through all 
shams and deceptive appearances, to God 
as the Holy Father, and to man as His lost 
and wandering child. It is easy enough to 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 173 

repeat these phrases, but they are not real 
perceptions unless they become the fixed 
and habitual temper of your whole mental 
and moral life, the standard of universal 
rational judgment, and the living law of 
obedience. With every advance in the 
clearness of your apprehension of what 
God is and what man is, there must come, 
pari passu, the prompt and voluntary prac- 
tical response. You must live as you 
think ; you must be obedient to the heav- 
enly vision ; for God and the soul, father- 
hood and sonship, are not figures of speech, 
the empty generalizations of the specula- 
tive understanding, but the only eternal 
realities in a universe of change. 1 

1 The nature of man is rational, ethical, spiritual ; 
it may be regarded as vovs, as avpeitiriffts and as irvevfxa. 
How do these differ ? 

Considered as rational, the quest of the soul is 
Truth. Its watchword is Reality. 

Considered as ethical, the soul fixes attention upon 
a peculiar quality with which truth is invested, giving 
to it the force of an imperative, demanding personal 
conformity, and enforcing universal self-judgment. 
Its watchword is Obligation. 

Considered as spiritual, the soul fixes attention 
upon God as the eternal fountain of Truth, and the 
creative source of Moral Law, Himself the uncreated 
and sovereign Reality and Imperative. 



174 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 

I have spoken of spirituality as a fixed 
mental and moral habit, and habit involves 
careful and patient cultivation. I proceed, 
therefore, to speak of the methods by 
which this quality must be developed into 
healthy and vigorous maturity. Of these, 
the first place must be given to attention. 
If even the physical universe does not 
yield its secret to the inattentive and su- 
perficial observer, if the inspection must be 
repeated and discriminating, with the per- 
sistent use of microscope and telescope 
and the most delicate instruments, much 
more true is it that the invisible realities 

Tlvevfxa, as Julius Muller says, does not primarily 
mean the human spirit, but the Divine Spirit ; and 
man becomes spiritual only as, by his free act, his 
rational and ethical life is pervaded, purified, and per- 
fected by and in the Holy Ghost. Spirituality is a 
voluntary state of rational and ethical subjection. 
Hence, the Germans translate UvevixariKhs, by the 
word geistlich, not geistig, — spirit-like; that is, con- 
formity to spirit, conformity to the Spirit of God. 
Spirituality represents a capacity, which may and 
ought to become a reality ; but not a constituent ele- 
ment of universal human nature, like the rational or 
the ethical. Reason is an essential property. Every 
man thinks. The process is involuntary and neces- 
sary. Conscience is a universal characteristic of 
human nature. It is incapable of increase or de- 
crease. Judas has as much conscience as Paul, or 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 175 

of Divine and human being demand hon- 
est, patient, and prolonged attention. No 
physiological processes can give us so 
much as a glimpse of the soul, or cast any 
light upon its essential constitution. You 
might as well attempt to construct the 
science of anatomy by an analysis and 
synthesis of the deliverances of conscious- 
ness. The soul is an ultimate and invisi- 
ble fact, the whole evidence of whose real 
existence is crystallized in the personal 
pronoun "I," and whose real nature can be 
understood only by the cross-examination 
which reflection employs. If psychology 

Peter, or John. Every man judges himself, and is 
the subject of self-approval, or of self-reproach. The 
process is involuntary and necessary. The spiritual 
is a constitutional capacity, whereby, in a free act and 
state, man places himself under the tuition and the 
guidance of God, becoming like Him in thought, in 
feeling, in volition, and in life. Its distinguishing 
characteristic is the supreme place which it gives to 
the Free Will in man, that will summoning the rea- 
son to face its creative Original, and securing an 
instant and joyful compliance with the revelation 
thus imparted. The process, throughout, is rational 
and ethical ; but spirituality results through the habit- 
ual temper of voluntary subjection to Him who is 
Truth and reveals it, who is Holy and makes us holy 
by making us like Himself. In other words, man be- 
comes spiritual through the grace of Faith. 



176 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING, 

has been less rapid in its advance than the 
physical sciences, the reason is that the 
processes of psychological attention are 
more difficult and exhaustive than the pro- 
cesses of sensuous observation. But he 
who deals with the souls of men must 
patiently face his own soul, and cannot be 
excused from giving continuous attention 
to what it has to say on its own behalf. 

Nor can there be any real conviction that 
there is a God, much less an adequate 
knowledge of what He is, except by pro- 
found and habitual attention to all the 
media through which His eternal Godhead 
is disclosed. The conviction is intuitive 
only in the sense that it is not foreign to 
the mind, intruded upon it from without, 
traditional, or the refuge of mental impo- 
tence, the necessary choice between two 
inconceivables. It is intuitive because it 
is inevitable to him who reflects, and be- 
cause repeated attention makes it only more 
irresistible to thought. It is not the pre- 
cipitate of observation; it emerges in ra- 
tional reflection. I need hardly remind you 
that the elaborate ontological, cosmological, 
teleological, and historical arguments for 
the Divine existence are no longer regarded 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 177 

as invulnerable and conclusive. They as- 
sume what they prove ; they do no more 
than trace the reflecting process by which 
the native and personal conviction justifies 
and interprets itself. No man climbs to 
the throne of God, by the pathway of the 
stars, who does not find the evidence of 
His existence and sovereignty first of all, in 
himself. I do not mean that there is any 
God-consciousness in him, — a barbarous 
translation of the German phrase, which 
strictly means only a native, rational, im- 
mediate conviction of the Divine existence. 
Consciousness is only of self ; but a rational 
attention to what this consciousness of our 
personal, mental, and moral states discloses, 
finds its root and synthesis only in the 
affirmation of the Divine existence and 
supremacy. The rational and the ethical, 
as we are conscious of them in ourselves, 
are uncreated and absolute in their quality ; 
we cannot think of them as relative and 
limited; and our whole conscious life is 
thrown into endless and hopeless contra- 
diction, unless we postulate the existence 
and the sovereignty of Reason and Right 
in the uncreated and eternal personal God. 
The process is not one of speculation, but 



178 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

of definition by attention. Attention scat- 
ters the mists, and reveals the uncreated 
glory, the eternal and sovereign reality. 
In biblical phrase, God reveals Himself to 
man, through faith ; to him whose attention 
is voluntary, sincere, and habitual. Here is 
our first duty ; to meditate long and lov- 
ingly upon ourselves and upon Him whose 
image we bear, until God and the soul shall 
master us with their reality. * 

You are already prepared for a second 
suggestion, that if you would be spiritually 
minded, you must be men of prayer. For 
such attention as I have emphasized, is 
itself the heart of prayer. The Socratic 
method is the spiritual method. It bristles 
with interrogation points. It is perpetually 
asking questions, seeking that it may find, 
knocking that doors may be opened. For 
while adoration, and confession, and thanks- 
giving, are inseparable from true prayer, 
petition is its heart; and petition always 
subordinates its request to the Divine will, 
the demand softening into the inquiry what 
that will is, so that we may pray as we 
ought. There is a lower use of prayer in 
which many rest. They come to God only 
when they need something, when the guilt 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 179 

and shame of sin oppress, when grief 
embitters life, when the spirit is over- 
whelmed with the sense of its weakness. 
The Lord is a strong refuge and a high 
tower, into which we run when our spears 
are broken and our shields trampled into 
dust. We think only of ourselves, and 
our speech is burdened with the enum- 
eration of our wants. But it is far more 
important that God should have His way 
with us, than that we should have our way 
with Him. For God knows us infinitely 
better than we know ourselves, and we shall 
ask most wisely when we let Him show 
us His mind. The twenty-third Psalm 
is the sweetest of all religious lyrics, be- 
cause of its discovery that God is the 
Shepherd of the soul. That not only 
secures against want; it drives out the 
very thought of want, so that David has 
no request to make. The path is always 
luminous, the table is always a royal ban- 
quet, the way is always secure, and even 
the grave is within the enclosure of the 
Divine' pasturage. 

This is the higher use of prayer, in which 
we question God about what He is and 
what we are, setting our psalm of life to 



180 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

the key of His self-revelation. He who 
does that will be jubilant, not sad-toned ; 
for all God's thoughts are a Gloria in Ex- 
celsis. It is the law of true politeness, 
when you are a guest, not to talk about 
yourself, unless your host leads the way 
and pursues the inquiry. You win his 
favor by admiring his home, his grounds, 
his library, his pictures, by falling into his 
line of thought, and enriching yourself by 
his experience. The more renowned and 
successful the man whom you meet, the 
more anxious you are to let him tell his 
story to you. If I could have Paul as my 
guest a week, I would not use five minutes 
of the time to tell him what I thought, nor 
would I open Meyer or Godet once during 
the interview. I should do nothing but 
ask questions, and let him do the rest of 
the talking. I should be perpetually anx- 
ious to know his mind. And tfo know the 
mind of God, what He thinks, desires and 
purposes, and what He is, is the highest 
function of prayer. You do not need to 
tell Him what you are, for He knows more 
than you do about that ; let Him tell you 
what He is, and how He regards you, for 
you will never know either, unless you sit 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 181 

silently and attentively at his feet. And 
this inquiring attitude must be habitual. 
It is well to pray morning, noon, and night; 
it is well to pray when you open your 
Bible and choose your text; it is well to 
pray with pen poised over the blank sheet ; 
it is well to pray before you utter the 
first word of your message ; but you may 
and must do more. Docility must be 
ingrained. Reverence must be habitual. 
Prayer must be your native air. In the 
utmost strain of your intellectual activity 
there must be a receptive and inquiring 
temper, which makes you eagerly respon- 
sive to anything which casts new light 
upon the character of Him in whom all 
live and move, and by whom all must be 
judged. So shall it not be you who speak, 
but the Spirit of your Father who dwelleth 
in you. 

No mistake, however, could be more 
serious than to imagine that because spir- 
ituality is the fixed mental and moral habit 
of dealing with the invisible and eternal 
realities of God and the soul, matured 
through attention and prayer, it is there- 
fore best promoted by contemplative de- 
votion. Self -absorption, even when deal- 



182 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

ing with the thought of God, has its 
dangers. We may easily mistake our 
fancies for the suggestions of the Spirit, 
as the ignorant and untrained are per- 
petually tempted to do. The old slave 
population of the South were the professed 
recipients of many such revelations ; but 
an honored friend of mine, whose early 
ministry was spent among them, said that 
the men thus honored, confessed, when 
they were questioned, that the Holy Ghost 
used the negro dialect, never the speech 
of a white man. That pricked the bubble, 
and proved the inspiration to be a mental 
hallucination. True spirituality is catholic 
and cosmopolitan. It moves along that 
level of common sense, which is a universal 
inheritance and possession. It deals with 
realities which lie close to all earnest 
thought. All souls are alike, and God 
does not change. He. cannot be to me 
what He is to no one else. His impar- 
tiality as the Father of all men, forbids 
the notion that He will make me the 
special and exclusive organ of a revelation, 
which wakes no response in any other 
heart, and which good and true men reject 
as blasphemous and silly. So I would 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT, 183 

rather mistrust my own judgment than 
break with the general drift of testimony 
in the living community of believers. 
There is a via media between intellectual 
isolation and an unreasonable subjection 
to traditional judgment. True thought is 
like a magnet introduced into a mixture 
of iron particles and sands. It sifts by 
attracting. The thought which attracts 
nothing to itself, proclaims itself thereby 
unmagnetized and untrue. What I see 
everybody else can see, if they will only 
use their eyes, though no one may see it 
until I direct his attention to it ; but if no 
one can see what I claim to see, the natu- 
ral inference is that there is something 
wrong with my eyes, and that it is time 
for me to consult an oculist. No one can 
see for me ; but the general perception is 
more trustworthy than my own. For if 
a thing is real, it must at least be real to 
every one who is constituted as I am. It 
is not otherwise with spirituality or the 
perception of invisible realities. These, 
too, must be dismissed as illusions, unless 
other men yield their prompt assent. 
They may have escaped attention, but they 
must compel conviction from every honest 



184 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

and thoughtful man. Upon no other 
theory can we cherish the assurance that 
Christianity is destined to supplant every 
other religion. It must triumph by its 
inherent energy to subdue all rational and 
sober thought. 

With this corresponds the New Testa- 
ment doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Individ- 
uals are the organs of His special revela- 
tion, and so become qualified to act as 
inspired prophets and apostles, only because 
the entire household of faith is under His 
instruction and guidance. The apostle does 
not stand alone ; he is only the organ of 
the Church, making clear and articulate 
the universal conviction, vague in the 
many, definite in him, and through him 
becoming definite in all. The Church is 
spoken of as the Body and the Bride of 
Christ ; and union with Christ by the 
Spirit is always represented as involving 
spiritual fellowship with the Christian com- 
munity. The tuition of the Spirit is not 
exclusively individualistic ; it is also ge- 
neric and social. It is carried on, corrected, 
and completed in the household of faith. 
It may seem as if the estimates of God, 
and of man, which I have so frequently 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 185 

emphasized, as the sources of spiritual 
power, are the spontaneous suggestions of 
clear thinking; but they are not. They 
have never emerged as vitalizing elements 
in pagan philosophy. That God is Father, 
and that man is His child, is the peculiar 
and authoritative testimony on the nature 
and relations of God and man, which is 
the priceless heritage of the Christian 
Church. You and I have learned the les- 
son from her lips, though it depends upon 
us whether it shall be merely a traditional 
shibboleth, or a vital and vitalizing truth. 
It is not true because she has taught it; 
she has taught it because it is true ; but 
we have come to the knowledge of it 
through the Word which she has preached, 
through the sacraments which she has ad- 
ministered, and through the prayers which 
we have caught from her lips. So far I, 
too, am a Churchman, and draw back from 
the erratic tendency of an isolated individ- 
ualism. I believe in the Holy Catholic 
Church, the communion of saints, which 
is the household of the Spirit, and to whose 
consentient testimony I bow, as embodying 
a profounder and healthier wisdom than 
my own. And in so doing, I learn to dis- 



186 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

tinguish between the shadow and the sub- 
stance, between a mere mental impression 
however vivid, and the living reality, which 
is universal and cogent in many minds, 
between an illusion and a revelation. Other 
men, too, have the Spirit of God, and are 
guided by Him, and He cannot be sup- 
posed to produce isolated and contradictory 
impressions, so that comparison and elimi- 
nation of that which is purely individual, 
must help us in the discovery of what the 
Spirit's teaching really is. This will secure 
for us mental modesty and moral sobriety, 
indispensable qualities for the Christian 
preacher. 

The critical and sifting process must be 
carried a step farther. For the Church that 
now is, is herself the product and the 
vehicle of an inherited faith. In this mat- 
ter the third century has no advantage 
over the nineteenth. The stream must be 
traced to its sources, for in the origin of 
the Church we must find the root of her 
past and her present authority. The docu- 
mentary records of our faith, therefore, are, 
and must ever be, of special significance. 
If we must test and correct our subjective 
mental impressions by the spiritual testi- 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 187 

mony of the Church, we are further bound 
to test and correct the latter by the judg- 
ment of the Holy Oracles, the Scriptures 
of the Old and New Testaments. This 
legitimates the Great Reformation of the 
sixteenth century, and constitutes the suffi- 
cient and unanswerable reply to the charge 
of schism, for the separation was made in- 
evitable by the movement of return to the 
form of Christian doctrine as contained in 
the Pauline epistles, to which on any theory, 
a higher authority must be conceded than 
to any subsequent decrees of councils or 
judgments of individual men. No inter- 
pretation of Christianity can maintain its 
ground which does not fully and fearlessly 
challenge comparison with the transmitted 
testimony of those who founded the Church. 
Pure Christianity must be primitive Chris- 
tianity, in its ruling conceptions and prin- 
ciples, whatever enrichment subsequent 
thought may have added, either to creed 
or ritual. The oak is not the acorn, but 
the germinant seed contains the type and 
the law of all succeeding development. 
That which is an involuntary and necessi- 
tated process in physics, must be secured 
by critical comparison in all movements of 



188 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

voluntary life. The State perpetually ap- 
peals to its fundamental law, to the inten- 
tion of its founders, whose political wisdom 
it hesitates to call in question, for it may 
be assumed that the men who are sum- 
moned to meet great and grave emergen- 
cies will be guided to discharge their duties 
with a sagacity and a courage equal to the 
task. The stars on the national banner 
may be increased fourfold within a cen- 
tury, but the flag remains the same, and 
the ruling ideas of the constitution con- 
tinue to be the controlling forces of the 
national development. Christianity with 
its wider outlook, conscious of its Divine 
origin, and ambitious of universal suprem- 
acy, is forced to the most careful and 
exhaustive criticism of its documentary 
records, which contain the story of the 
planting and the training of the Church. 
The New Testament must be our final 
court of appeal, compelling us to reject all 
that is subversive of its teaching, and re- 
manding to the sphere of personal liberty 
everything upon which it does not speak 
with clear and decisive authority. 

Primitive Christianity is the only rational 
formal basis of Christian union, not the 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 189 

councils of the first six centuries, nor even 
the Apostles' Creed, whose doctrine of 
Christ's descent into Hades trenches upon 
the inferential and doubtful. So long as 
this result has not been reached, the debate 
between Wittenberg and Rome cannot be 
concluded; and within the lines of Prot- 
estantism, the severe cross-examination 
must continue until the ferment and the 
friction of thought shall undermine all 
unauthorized claims, eliminate all foreign 
elements in doctrine, policy, and ritual, 
restoring the simplicity and the vitality of 
the apostolic faith. A historic episcopate, 
for example, is an illogical compromise, 
and an impossible condition to Christian 
Catholicity. Its antiquity may be ad- 
mitted, its beneficent historical influence 
may be granted, but it can never be made 
binding unless the Acts and the Epistles 
disclose its apostolic institution. The 
testimony of the Church is not to be lightly 
esteemed, and we should be hesitant to 
charge its leaders with deliberate deception, 
but we are bound to test all its judgments 
by the authority of the Scriptures, which 
on any theory of their origin, is primary, 
and so far plenary and final. If we may 



190 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

not break with the living Church, much 
more, and on that very account, may we 
not break with our Bibles. Spirituality 
must move within the sphere of scriptural 
testimony. Our mental impressions must 
be tested and corrected by the records 
which contain the primitive revelation. 
Our views of what God is, and what man 
is, must combine into exact and harmoni- 
ous proportions, all that is disclosed in 
precept and in promise, in judgment and 
in blessing, in personal discipline and in 
national history. God and the soul are 
the great, permanent invisible realities ; 
they constitute, for us, the moral and eter- 
nal universe ; and of these realities, the 
Scriptures give us the oldest, the complet- 
est, and the most authoritative account. 
They constitute a carefully prepared and 
sifted library on these important themes, 
which we neglect at our peril in the study 
of God and of man ; and spirituality pre- 
serves its healthy tone, guarded from the 
extravagances of unregulated individual 
conceit, only by a careful and habitual 
attention to what the Holy Oracles teach. 
They must be our celestial telescope, 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 191 

through which we discover the secrets of 
invisible being. 

One more step must be taken. For 
while the Scriptures are the authentic and 
authoritative record of the revelation of 
God to man, they are not themselves the 
revelation. The Divine disclosure, as the 
record plainly shows, passed from lower to 
ever higher stages. It became more defi- 
nite, more exalted, more fruitful, more 
energetic, until it culminated in the holy 
mystery of the Incarnation. Holy men of 
old spake as they were moved by the Holy 
Ghost; but in Jesus Christ the fulness of 
the Godhead dwelleth bodily. It is a long 
step from Moses to Isaiah, and a longer 
step from Malachi to John. If we had 
only Moses, we should have much; but 
having Christ, it behooves us to honor Him 
as our Master. It is the theology of Christ 
we want. It is the spiritual vision of 
Christ, His estimate of God and of man, 
which we should strive to attain. And by 
that I do not mean the separation of Christ 
and of His teaching from all that preceded 
His advent, and followed after His ascen- 
sion. Cut the heart out of the body, and 
both become lifeless. Christ is the heart 



192 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

of the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures, 
and the criticism which proceeds upon the 
principle of excision will have neither a 
living Christ, nor a living Bible. The 
God-man emerges in the fulness of time, 
and He can be understood only in the 
light of his vital environment, as the hope 
of all the prophets, and as He to whom all 
apostles bear joyful and united testimony. 
But He is the sun in the hierarchy of 
spiritual teachers. He is the vine in 
whom we must have our abiding, if we are 
to bear much fruit. His flesh we must 
eat, and His blood we must drink. At 
His feet we must sit, and His Spirit must 
transfigure our own. We must not only 
preach Him, but we must preach what He 
preached, and as He preached it. It is not 
enough to hide behind Him ; He must 
shine through us, stirring our hearts, shap- 
ing our thoughts, illumining our faces. 
Ringing the changes on the sentences and 
clauses of the creeds of Chalcedon and of 
Constantinople is not preaching Christ. 
An orthodox Christology does not consti- 
tute you a Christian preacher. Eloquent 
and impassioned eulogy of the Cross is not 
preaching Christ, and Him crucified. He 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 193 

must subdue you until your whole rational, 
emotional, and volitional life moves along 
the level of His own, until His estimates 
of God and of the soul become your own, 
and secure your glad and habitual subjec- 
tion. For He was God and He was man. 
He understood both exhaustively, and in 
His active and passive obedience the 
mighty achievement of human rescue and 
redemption was secured. So the world 
needs to know not only what He is, and 
what He has done, but what He thought 
about God and man. 

Nay, more, God is what He is, and man 
ought to be what He is ; so that every 
problem, Divine and human, finds in Him 
its solution. He must be our guide in the 
interpretation of the Scriptures. For crit- 
ical and scientific purposes, it is well to 
trace the revelation of God in its historical 
development; but for practical purposes, 
and in preaching, the order should be re- 
versed, and the voice of Jesus Christ be 
made to ring in the ears of men. Do not 
tarry in the outer court. Do not linger 
in the holy place. The veil has been 
rent, and 3^ou should not stay until your 
hands are on the mercy-seat. Make 



194 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

Christ's estimates your own. Think of 
Him as the manifested God. His tears at 
the grave of Lazarus, and over doomed 
Jerusalem, His prayer on the cross for 
those who put Him to death, and His 
dying charge to John to care for His 
broken-hearted mother, are worth more as 
a disclosure of what God really is, than all 
the labored conceits of the scholastic phi- 
losophers. Get your theology from the 
parable of the prodigal son. Think of jus- 
tice as having tears in it. Make the 
Fatherhood of God, as taught by Christ, 
and illustrated by His conduct among men, 
real to yourself, and your preaching will 
have spiritual power. There is anger in 
God, but it is always the anger of out- 
raged Fatherhood, and that gives to the 
Divine anger its moral majesty and power. 
And what man is, you can best learn from 
Him who brake bread with publicans and 
sinners, who blessed the little children, 
who prayed for Peter, that his faith might 
not fail, and whose withering curse fell 
only upon one class of men, the hypo- 
crites, souls honeycombed with falsehood, 
in whom moral integrity had been deliber- 
ately crushed out. The world needs His 



THE SPIRITUAL ELEMENT. 195 

Gospel, the Church needs His Spirit more ; 
and His Gospel will not conquer the world, 
until His Spirit pervades and rules the 
Church. Nor will it ever pervade and rule 
the Church, so long as it is in any way re- 
strained in us, who believe ourselves com- 
missioned to preach the Gospel in Christ's 
name. You must have Peter's vision, that 
nothing which God has made, and upon 
which He has set the seal of His ownership 
and adoption, is common or unclean. The 
man who is not ready to be the servant of 
the most degraded has not the spirit of 
Christ in him ; and though he may be tol- 
erated in the Church, he is unfit to take 
the lowest place in the ranks of the 
Christian ministry. 

Here I must leave you, face to face with 
Him, whom, having not seen, you love, in 
whom you trust, to whose service you have 
pledged your lives, and with whom you 
must walk, if you would know the truth, 
and secure the baptism of power. I have 
taxed your attention long; but the su- 
preme importance of the theme must be 
my apology and justification. 



THE PEACTICAL ELEMENT IN 
PBEACHING. 

Among American preachers, Charles G. 
Finney will always hold a deservedly high 
place. For whatever may be said of his 
theological views, of the crudeness of his 
style, and of his revival methods, they 
were all the instruments of an intensely 
earnest nature, and they were wielded with 
extraordinary power. It was his constant 
insistence that ministers should preach with 
a view to immediate results ; and that this 
could be done only as the hearer could be 
made to see that the theology of the pulpit 
was rational, vital, and thoroughly consis- 
tent. No man believed in sound doctrine 
more than did he, but his lawyer's instinct 
made him feel that a doctrinal system which 
put a strait-jacket upon him, and prevented 
him from securing a prompt and practical 
response, ought to be flung aside, and dis- 
carded without a moment's hesitation. And 
196 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 197 

therein he was right. There is such a thing 
as dogmatic tyranny, against which the 
pulpit is summoned to exercise eternal 
vigilance. As between the chair of dog- 
matic theology and the pulpit, the primacy 
belongs to the latter ; and whenever a sys- 
tem becomes so hard and unyielding that 
it withers the sinews of practical appeal, it 
has not only outlived its usefulness ; it con- 
victs and condemns itself as both illogical 
and inadequate. A theology which can- 
not be preached fearlessly and faithfully, 
which takes refuge in wire-drawn distinc- 
tions and reservations, which confuses the 
speaker and confounds the hearer, cannot 
be a true reading either of God or man. 
God is not playing hide and seek with us, 
and we may not speak to men in His name, 
using phrases and defending doctrinal state- 
ments which perplex an honest soul. 

It may be that Mr. Finney has un- 
consciously overdrawn the picture of the 
preaching to which he was accustomed to 
listen in his early manhood, when men 
were urged to repent, and then told that 
the very ability to repent was the gift of 
an unconditional decree of Divine elec- 
tion ; when they were summoned to believe 



198 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

in Christ, and informed in the next breath 
that they could not believe until they had 
been supernaturally regenerated. The de- 
scription, however, is anything but a cari- 
cature. Thousands of men have felt the 
palsying effect of the system against which 
this fiery preacher revolted. The memory 
of such preaching comes back to me, with 
the terror and agony which it awakened, 
supposed at the time to be evidences of a 
Divine operation, but which I have long 
since come to regard as diseased mental 
and moral states ; and I have good reason 
to believe that this style of preaching is 
far from having become obsolete. In a 
recent correspondence with the head of one 
of our American theological seminaries, 
the position was deliberately taken that 
all true moral freedom was lost in the fall 
of our first parents, that the only liberty 
which survived the apostasy in Eden was 
the formal one of choosing between dif- 
ferent courses of sin, leaving the soul un- 
conditionally dependent upon an act of 
Divine power before it was invested with 
the ability to repent and believe. It is 
possible for a man to hold such a specula- 
tive system, and then preach with an utter 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 199 

disregard to it, on the principle that as the 
Divine decree is secret and unsearchable, 
every man must be addressed as if no such 
decree existed ; but in such a case it might 
be as well to eliminate the doctrine of de- 
crees altogether. The longer you preach, 
the profounder will become your convic- 
tion that men can be quickened into spirit- 
ual life only by the power of the Holy 
Ghost ; and you will discover, pari passu, 
that you cannot grapple with men unless 
you charge upon them the full and exclu- 
sive responsibility for their moral state. 
These are the two poles of thought betAveen 
which all theology swings, with the con- 
stant temptation to eliminate either the 
one or the other in the interest of scien- 
tific unity. The worse heresy, however, of 
the two, in my deliberate judgment, is that 
which fails to emphasize the reality of 
man's moral freedom ; which, for example, 
appears to invest him with it in recogniz- 
ing his natural ability, and then reduces it 
to zero by the doctrine of moral impotence. 
But whether you agree with me in this 
attitude or not, the point of urgency is 
this, that your theology must be the out- 
come of your preaching, not its antecedent, 



200 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

superimposed condition and limitation. It 
must be forged anew, link by link, in your 
earnest grapple with men. The Word of 
God is a hammer, a coal of fire, a two- 
edged sword. A hammer breaks ; fire 
burns ; the sword pierces ; and you must 
have a theology which does all that. Do 
not understand me as undervaluing thor- 
ough and systematic theological training. 
The years which you are spending in these 
quiet halls, and under the instruction of 
tried and trained teachers, are years which 
you should improve to the utmost. They 
will familiarize you with the great systems 
of thought, which have been patiently 
wrought out amid the stress and strain of 
fierce controversy ; and there is nothing so 
conducive to mental sobriety and balance 
as the careful study of historical theology. 
The sublime unity of the Christian faith 
will command growing and grateful recog- 
nition amid the widest diversity of state- 
ment. The discovery will give you anchor- 
age for all the years to come ; it will 
prevent you from mistaking eccentricity 
for originality, and will guard you from 
that waste of intellectual energy, which 
ignorantly spends its strength in rehabili- 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT, 201 

tating old and exploded dogmas. But 
this conservative temper, provoked and 
fostered by historical study, will also make 
you more genuinely and profoundly cath- 
olic. It will make you impatient of 
theological partisanship. Robertson, of 
Brighton, made frequent use of the prin- 
ciple, which he borrowed from the Hege- 
lian philosophy, that all true thought 
proceeds from thesis and antithesis, to 
synthesis, from affirmation and denial, to 
a more comprehensive formula. It is Atha- 
nasius against Arius, Augustine against 
Pelagius, Anselm against Grotius and Soci- 
nus, Luther against Zwingle, Calvin against 
Wesley ; and the heretics manage in time 
to tone down the extreme positions of their 
antagonists. The living thought of our 
time refuses to be confined in the vocabu- 
lary of any preceding theological school; 
and what we have been pleased to call 
consistent Calvinism, or improvements upon 
the Genevan theology, is only a euphemism 
covering the practical abandonment of cer- 
tain positions once deliberately taken and 
stoutly defended. In this matter Prince- 
ton has been as great a sinner as New 
Haven ; and Charles Hodge was as much 



202 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

an innovator as Nathaniel W. Taylor; 
while the younger Hodge found it neces- 
sary at almost every step to say that he 
did not quite agree with his father, or that 
he preferred a slightly different statement. 
Calvinism has been Arminianized, and Ar- 
minianism has become Calvinized ; and the 
patient reading of Wigger's monograph 
on Augustinianism has convinced many of 
us that Pelagius was not so great a heretic 
as we once imagined. There is something 
to me very suggestive in the fact that of 
all the fathers, as we call them, the most 
modern is Chrysostom, who was a great 
theologian only as he was a great preacher, 
working out his theology under the pres- 
sure of tremendous practical emergency. 
No system of theology can be absorbed, 
which must not be again broken to pieces, 
and passed through the fiery crucible of 
personal meditation, shaping itself into logi- 
cal forms and phrases of your own, before 
you can find the truest freedom in preach- 
ing. You must wear your own coat, fitted 
to your own person; and you must have 
your own theology. 

The conservatism and the catholicity of 
which I have spoken, should be at once 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 203 

an encouragement to independence and a 
salutary restraint upon it. The substance 
of your message can never be of your in- 
vention. But the treasure has come to 
you in earthen vessels, and even the lan- 
guage of the Bible may be followed in the 
spirit of mechanical bondage. It is the 
prophetic and apostolic thought which you 
must seize, and then reproduce it in your 
own vernacular. For language is every- 
where mobile. It is in perpetual flux. It 
bears the impress of time. The dictionary 
is not -always an infallible court of appeal. 
Classical usage may mislead you. And if 
this is true, even of the Scriptures, much 
more is it true of the long line of the great 
teachers of the Church, who have given 
their best powers to the exposition of the 
Gospel. Every one of them shows the in- 
fluence of his training, of his mental and 
moral peculiarities, of the philosophy which 
dominated him, and of the logical meth- 
ods current in his time. 

In no department of language is this 
element of change more patent than in 
the use made of illustrations. At one 
time they are imperial, as in the psalms 
and the prophets ; at another time they are 



204 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

legal, as in the epistles of Paul and in 
the Augustinian theology ; at another time 
they are commercial or governmental^ as 
in more recent years. Thus on the basis 
of Paul's comparison between Adam and 
Christ, introduced by way of illustration, 
the whole doctrine of sin and of redemp- 
tion has been constructed, with the notion 
of imputation rigorously carried through 
every part. So, again, the idea of a cov- 
enant, as embodying the peculiar feature 
of Jewish national life, has been carried 
back into Eden, and into the counsels of 
eternity, resolving all moral history into 
the execution and fulfilment of a con- 
tract. Illustrations are impressive and 
useful, so long as they are used by way of 
suggestion ; but they are mischievous when 
they are charged with the office of logical 
construction ; and a very large part of the 
preacher's intellectual task consists in seiz- 
ing the vital truth, which hides behind all 
analogies, and which must not be allowed 
to become imprisoned in any, using them 
all, dispensing with them all, and creating 
more fitting ones, as the case may require. 
In all this, one thing requires emphasis, 
■ — you must be theologians. You must 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 205 

have a clear-cut, definite, symmetrical body 
of religious convictions, supported by a 
close and patient study of the Bible. You 
will be despised if your mental equipment 
consists of rags ; you will be laughed at 
if it is made up of an incongruous assort- 
ment of patches. Your doctrinal system 
may be very meagre, and it may be 
very comprehensive and exhaustive; but 
whether the one or the other, it must be 
homogeneous and consistent, bearing in 
its every part the impress of your per- 
sonal elaboration, as the famous shield of 
classic story is said to have been so forged 
that were it broken into a thousand frag- 
ments, every one of them would have pro- 
claimed the name of its maker. You can 
make no greater mistake than to abandon 
the study of systematic theology upon 
your graduation. In science, in art, you 
may be content that your hearers shall be 
greatly your superiors ; but in your mi- 
nute and systematic knowledge of the 
Bible, the occupancy of a pulpit compels 
you to seek for such mastery that your 
aptness to teach will be recognized by all. 
Now and then I meet a man who says, 
" Well, since I left the seminary I have 



206 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

dismissed theology, and have been content 
to read the New Testament." But an 
hour's talk has convinced me that the New 
Testament had fallen into the same neg- 
lect, that the reading had become scrappy 
and superficial, that thought had become 
hazy, uncertain, and confusing, and that 
the preaching had lost its manly vigor. 
No man can read the psalms, the prophets, 
the epistles, without girding his intel- 
lectual loins, and without being forced to 
search for and seize the ruling ideas by 
which all the separate utterances are 
shaped and co-ordinated. Nothing is of 
greater practical importance than this per- 
sonal, independent mastery of the vital 
theology which is contained in the Holy 
Oracles. In the prosecution of this en- 
deavor, the best books will soon come 
under your notice, and find their way upon 
your library shelves, critical, exegetical, 
historical, and theological. Nor will you 
be able to conduct these inquiries with- 
out constant reference to psychology and 
ethics ; for it is still true that no difficulty 
emerges in theology which is not also a 
problem in philosophy, and in which ethi- 
cal conceptions do not play a most impor- 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 207 

tant part. Nor can you afford to ignore 
political economy, in either of its two 
great departments, civil and economic sci- 
ence. For not only are these integral parts 
of the Mosaic code ; but the record of 
Scripture is largely a revelation of God in 
His treatment of nations, and a disclos- 
ure of the forces by which national pros- 
perity, decadence, and ruin have been 
determined. The science of government 
is a moral science, because it deals with 
man, and no governmental statutes may 
trench upon the moral dignity of the hu- 
man subject. Nor can economic science, 
in its discussions, ignore the moral factor, 
discoursing of capital and labor, of pro- 
duction and distribution, in terms of im- 
personal speech ; for it is the man, who is 
capitalist or laborer, producer or con- 
sumer; and economic regulations and cus- 
toms must not be permitted to crush or 
deface the manhood of the lowliest. 

In the controversy on electrical light- 
ing, the courts of New York decided that 
corporate rights were limited by public 
safety ; and that whenever it became clear 
that human life was endangered by any 
corporation, the latter became a public nui- 



208 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

sance, which any man had a right to abate. 
Man is the only sacred thing on the globe, 
whose natural rights may not be ignored, 
who may neither be enslaved nor imbruted. 
We may do what we will, with all that 
grows in the soil, or is found in the for- 
ests, or is hidden in the earth, or flies in 
the air, or swims in the sea ; but he who 
sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his 
blood be shed. It is the fearful lesson of 
universal history, that there is something 
in man which resents the touch of oppres- 
sion, so that tyranny always builds its 
throne upon an earthquake. There is no 
beast so ferocious, no serpent so venomous, 
that you cannot exterminate them or drive 
them into harmless seclusion ; but these 
arts cannot safely be plied with men. The 
memory of wrong abides ; the power of 
retaliation slowly gathers ; the whisper be- 
comes a wail ; the wail mounts into a cry 
of rage ; and the rage bursts into blind and 
ruthless vengeance. 

Let us not deceive ourselves. The 
forces which destroyed Egypt and Baby- 
lon, which hastened the fall of Rome, and 
which heaved in the French Revolution, 
slumber in every human breast, within 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 209 

which rankles the sense of wrong. What 
the white man will not tolerate, the black 
man will not forever endure ; what the 
rich man resents, the poor man will not 
quietly suffer ; and however proud we may- 
be of our Anglican and American civil- 
ization, we must not forget that disdain of 
man, and injustice to him, develop a storm 
centre before whose fury nothing can 
stand. This is the practical side of relig- 
ion, to love your neighbor as yourself, not 
to carry him, but to give him all the elbow 
room which you demand for yourself ; and 
this is not a sentimental duty, a grace of 
refined life, an ethical superfluity, but the 
sternest of all political and industrial im- 
peratives, apart from which there can be 
no permanent security to person or prop- 
erty. To this bold defence of universal 
manhood, your vocation consecrates you. 
That must be your message to those who 
bear rule in the state, and who control the 
industries of the country, taking care 
meanwhile not to meddle with questions 
of method and of application, for which 
your hearers are presumed to be better 
qualified than you possibly can be. For 
the Christian preacher should never permit 



210 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

himself to sink to the level of a mere 
social and industrial reformer. He will do 
his best work if he resolutely refrains from 
becoming a partisan, from identifying him- 
self with methods and measures which 
come within the realm of expediency, and 
the endorsement or criticism of which does 
not involve the application of universal 
ethical principles. You are to keep your 
eye fixed upon the man, made in the image 
of God, and therefore inviolable ; not upon 
his environment, which is incidental and 
subordinate, and which in a perfect society 
would remain as varied as are the capac- 
ities and endowments, the industry and 
energy, of the individuals who constitute 
the social organism. I do not say that 
occasions may not arise when you must 
range yourselves on one side of a great 
popular contest or on the other, when to 
be silent would be cowardice and betrayal 
of your trust; for the pulpit should be 
God's mouthpiece against tyranny and op- 
pression, whether ecclesiastical or civil or 
social or industrial. Of this you must 
be the judges ; but you ought to be per- 
fectly sure that an intelligent zeal for 
God and man is the fire which burns in 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 211 

your bones, and which unseals your lips, 
and that it is not a feverish excitement pro- 
duced by the heated and unwholesome 
atmosphere of the time. 

Yon will conclude, from what I have 
said, that a pretty broad field of intel- 
lectual activity awaits your entrance, in 
which your powers will be taxed to the 
utmost, and incessantly. That is just the 
conviction which I wish to impress upon 
you. The preacher's mission is no sin- 
ecure. It is not an elegant leisure to 
which you are summoned, where you may 
indulge your scholarly tastes, and become 
the centre of a select and refined circle. 
You are to be fishers of men, and the 
most costly tackle in the market is worth- 
less if the trout do not leap when you cast 
the fly. The Gospel of Christ is needed 
wherever you go, and you must so preach 
it as to set men to thinking about the mes- 
sage which you have brought to them. 
Alas for you if they only praise the ser- 
mon, or the grace of your polished utter- 
ance; you must plant barbed arrows in 
their hearts, which shall leave behind them 
the pain of a godly sorrow. - God and 
Christ, sin and salvation, redemption and 



212 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

judgment, must be made intensely real to 
them ; and you can make real to others 
only what is vivid to yourself. So I say 
again, and would repeat it a thousand 
times : Be theologians. Let your theol- 
ogy be practical, never swinging in air, 
but let there be theology. You must 
have something to say, and the thing 
which you say must be an expression 
of the thought of God, and of the mind 
of Christ; which again amounts to this, 
that the Christian preacher must be a 
Christian theologian. 

When, twenty-five years ago, I was 
graduated from the theological seminary, 
and ordained as pastor over a quiet sub- 
urban church on the banks of the Hudson 
River, I determined that my first work 
should be a close and patient study of the 
Person of Christ. I felt that I must know 
who my master was. The first book I 
purchased was Dorner's History of the 
Person of Christ, which still remains the 
best monograph on the subject. For more 
than two years I plodded along, reading 
right and left, as my time and resources 
would pernit, in systematic and historical 
theology, with close and constant refer- 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 213 

ence to the Gospels and Epistles as writ- 
ten in their chronological order. I have 
never regretted the choice I made, nor the 
studies with which I followed it, when I 
made Miiller's monograph on the doctrine 
of sin the subject of an equally close 
reading. I doubt whether a theological 
graduate can do better now, than to be- 
gin his pastoral studies with Christology. 
Until that is mastered, I would shelve 
eschatology. For in my deliberate judg- 
ment, the constitution of our Lord's Person 
is the one thing on which the most defi- 
nite instruction is needed, and with regard 
to which there is a subtle and insidious 
tendency in modern thought to depart 
from the New Testament representation. 
The evangelical, and even the ecclesias- 
tical phrases are retained; but the}^ are 
emptied of their meaning. The Incarna- 
tion is interpreted in the light of man's 
creation in the image of God. God and 
man are regarded as homogeneous in 
nature, as mutually inclusive, and not 
exclusive. This philosophical postulate is 
Scriptural, and is of immense advantage ; 
but it has paved the way for a new series 
of Christological errors. The man Christ 



I 



214 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

Jesus, the bearer of a sinless and perfect, 
an ideal and archetypal humanity, has 
come by many to be regarded as ipso facto, 
the manifested God; and his deity has 
been reduced to a unique divinity. It is 
a new form of Unitarianism, retaining the 
language which Christian usage has con- 
secrated. According to this view God was 
indeed in Christ, but only as He is poten- 
tially in every man, as He is consciously 
and energetically in every holy man, as he 
must be in plenary power in the holiest of 
men, in the man whose moral altitude is 
the loftiest. 

Such an interpretation might possibly 
cover the description in the Synoptic Gos- 
pels, and even the statements in the Pauline 
Epistles ; but it will not fit the facts which 
emerge in the Gospel of John, which 
embodies the ripest fruit of the matured 
apostolic reminiscence and reflection. For 
in this Gospel our Lord is represented as 
having affirmed His conscious existence 
in Abraham's day, as having claimed the 
right to equal honor with the Father, and 
as having prayed that He might be inves- 
ted with the glory which He had with the 
Father before the world was. The sinless 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 215 

man could not have said these things, if 
they were not true ; and they disclose to 
us the deepest ground of His disciplined 
and matured personal consciousness. There 
is a great and impassable gulf here be- 
tween Him and all other men. The period 
before birth is to us all an absolute blank ; 
and the first years of our infancy are 
shrouded in the same impenetrable gloom. 
No philosopher, no saint, has been able to 
pierce to the beginnings of mortal life. 
What must the personal consciousness be 
which leaps back to Abraham's time, and 
to the period antedating creation ? Out 
of that reminiscence grew in John's mind 
the doctrine of the Logos, in the prologue 
to his Gospel ; which doctrine is thus seen 
to be not a speculative notion, borrowed 
from Alexandria, but a strictly inductive 
conclusion from the facts which our Lord's 
utterances disclosed. It may not be pos- 
sible to define the exact nature of the 
indwelling Deity in the man Jesus Christ ; 
but it certainly was altogether unique, 
constituting Him the only begotten Son 
of God; and the spiritual indwelling of 
God in believers cannot be accepted as an 
analogue, for the simple reason that there 



216 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

were elements in Christ's matured personal 
consciousness, which are wanting, even in 
the most rudimentary forms, in the con- 
scious life of humanity. 

"On the nature of the indwelling of God 
in Christ, the Church has never been able 
to pronounce judgment, and it probably 
will never be able to do so. It has con- 
tented itself with negative deliverances. 
It has rejected Nestorianism, because that 
kept the God and the man too far apart ; 
it rejected Eutychianism, because that 
brought them too close together, making 
of them an incongruous mixture ; it rejec- 
ted Apollinarianism, because that truncated 
the man; and. it has rejected every notion 
which suggested a dormant, or paralyzed, 
or quiescent God, or which regarded Him 
as having reduced Himself to the dimen- 
sions of a human soul. It has insisted 
upon leaving intact the man Christ Jesus ; 
but it has also claimed that what He said 
about Himself disclosed a unique indwell- 
ing of essential Godhood, whose reality 
cannot be gainsaid without impeaching 
either his veracity or his mental saniry. 
And it is equally plain that the unique 
and mysterious personal constitution of 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 217 

our Lord gives a peculiar authority to his 
teachings, a singular force to his precepts 
and promises, a unique function to his 
death, resurrection, ascension, and inter- 
cession. My apology for this doctrinal 
digression must be the important part which 
this theme has had in my own early studies, 
and the central place which it holds in the 
theology of the present. The most practi- 
cal thing any of you can do is to make 
your footing in Christology firm and secure, 
so that you can preach the Living Christ 
as the wisdom and the power of God unto 
salvation. 

Of hardly less practical importance is 
the rule that the preacher should always 
aim to make himself perfectly understood 
by all who listen to him. By this I do not 
mean that his thought and utterance must 
be on a level with the youngest and the 
least matured in his audience. A certain 
degree of mental and moral activity is re- 
quired in the hearer ; and this preliminary 
discipline belongs more properly to the 
household, than to the preacher in the con- 
duct of public worship and in the discharge 
of his office as a Christian teacher. The 
pulpit must address itself to men and 



218 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

women, and to all whose years have brought 
them to habits of reflection, and to the 
period of clear-cut conscious personal re- 
sponsibility ; while parents must be urged 
to be priests in their own homes, rearing 
their children in the nurture and admoni- 
tion of the Lord. The pulpit must be mas- 
culine, not infantile. Even the children 
will be attracted by its manliness. For 
they soon become impatient of any mode 
of address, or tone of utterance, which sug- 
gests condescension on the part of the 
speaker ; and I apprehend that we do not 
give them full credit for the intellectual 
and moral activity of which they are com- 
petent. Almost before you know it, your 
boys and girls, if you have cultivated their 
acquaintance and secured their friendship 
in a manly way, will become your most 
attentive listeners and your keenest critics. 
I have frequently been surprised at the 
way in which lads twelve and fourteen 
years of age, and young misses no older, 
have spoken to me of the help given them 
by discourses which I had supposed to be 
beyond their comprehension, in the prep- 
aration and delivery of which I had simply 
endeavored to use the language of the peo- 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 219 

pie ; and my own ministry has convinced 
me that children are keener listeners than 
we suspect. 

A much more serious and prevalent ob- 
stacle to the preacher's success, than the 
immaturity of his hearers, is the distraction 
of their thought, their volatile and incon- 
stant temper. They are active about too 
many things, and the will is not summoned 
to exert its power of restraint. There is a 
lack of attention, and that can never be 
remedied by anything but the manliest ad- 
dress, where weighty thought is commu- 
nicated in clear, dignified, and forcible 
speech. Do not put on the air of a phi- 
losopher. Do not speak in the language of 
a professional theologian. On the other 
hand, do not become a clown nor pose as a 
wit, nor run into story telling, nor fall into 
the slang of the street. The true speech 
of the pulpit is plain, direct, unconven- 
tional, conversational, with a quiet, manly 
dignity befitting the occasion and the 
theme. 

I have spoken of the imperative neces- 
sity of recasting the results of your profes- 
sional studies into logical and verbal forms 
of your own. The process needs to be car- 



220 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

ried a step farther, to the translation of 
your own theological conceptions into the 
vocabulary of the people. It is reported of 
one of the Alexanders that he once sup- 
plied the place of a theological student in 
a rural pulpit near Princeton, where no 
one knew him, and that one of the elders 
wrote back to the seminary, that while the 
old man was not as fine a preacher as their 
regular supply, he was a " mighty good 
talker," had interested the people very 
much, and that everybody would be glad 
to hear him again. A good talker is the 
most effective preacher. He will wear the 
longest and command the highest regard. 
Sound, sensible talk, when it is dashed with 
wholesome passion, and vital with intense 
earnestness, will break out into the most 
genuine eloquence and pathos. 

I am afraid that we have studied models 
of eloquence too much. There is a won- 
derful similarity between the great and 
effective preachers of any single period. 
There is an equally marked difference be- 
tween the great and effective preachers of 
any given period, and those who preceded 
or followed them. There is often the, 
greatest contrast between the early and the 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 221 

later style of the same man, as may be no- 
ticed in the case of Charles H. Spurgeon. 
The change is partly clue to personal de- 
velopment, but mainly to an increasingly 
closer identification with popular habits of 
speech. Language, too, is an elastic in- 
strument ; it is in a state of constant flux : 
and the speech of the pulpit, where it is 
most vigorous and effective, always betrays 
the current forms of earnest and thoughtful 
address. As in the pronunciation and defi- 
nition of words we frequently pass from 
the dictionaries to ordinary usage, so must 
language be studied and mastered as a liv- 
ing organism, not as an embalmed or pet- 
rified relic of the past. Macaulay, and 
Robert Hall, and Foster, may be read to 
great advantage, but so may the periodicals 
and the newspapers of the present day. 
The current speech may not be as classical 
and polished as your scholarly tastes might 
wish it were, but you must take it as you 
find it, avoid its coarseness, and make the 
best use of it possible. You may not ig- 
nore it, any more than you would ignore 
the coat, vest, and pantaloons, Avhich society 
has adopted as a man's regulation dress. 
You may think knee-breeches, and a scarlet 



222 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

waistcoat, and silver shoe-buckles, and pow- 
dered hair, and lace ruffles, much more pic- 
turesque and becoming, but you would 
hardly appear in such an outfit in the pul- 
pit. Style is the dress of thought. It must 
conform to popular usage. It must not be 
antique and antiquated, but modern and 
practical. Instruction in rhetoric and logic 
is not confined to a few classical models ; it 
must be sought, with equal diligence, in 
the language which the great majority uses. 
And this common speech will be found 
not to be lacking in dignity and force. It 
is a noble instrument, by the use of which 
society conducts its intellectual exchange, 
and whose simple nervous energy the best 
literature appropriates and preserves. Talk 
in the pulpit as earnest men talk to each 
other, and as they talk to you. That will 
be almost sure to lead you to cultivate 
what is called extemporaneous preaching, 
— which is neither memoriter recitation, 
nor loose, unconnected, unpremeditated 
speech, — but the free utterance of clear 
and thoroughly mastered thought. You 
ought to be able to read a book, and then, 
without a memorandum to help you, to 
give an intelligent and connected state- 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 223 

ment of its argument and conclusions, just 
as the best recitation in the class-room is 
the free reproduction of the assigned les- 
son. I remember reciting page after page 
of Butler's Analogy without any conscious- 
ness of verbal bondage, having been solely 
intent upon grasping the thought in all its 
windings and in its logical termination. 
And you ought to be able to write a care- 
ful and connected "synopsis of a sermon, 
amounting almost to a fully written dis- 
course, and then reproduce it in the speech 
which the thought will spontaneously sug- 
gest. The secret consists in the mastery 
of the matter, and in the clearness of the 
logical analysis. It involves the abandon- 
ment of an ambition to say fine or eloquent 
things, and to make your discourses bril- 
liant with literary adornment ; though the 
truest eloquence will come often when you 
are least laboring for it, when your thought 
is at white heat, and when phrases will leap 
to your lips which half an hour afterwards 
you may not be able to reproduce. The 
secret of forcible extemporaneous speech is 
in having something weighty to say, and in 
the determination to make yourself clearly 
understood. Whether you use the pen or 



224 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

not, in the work of preparation, is a matter 
of subordinate importance, though the rule 
will be a pretty free and careful use of the 
pen, without a slavish bondage to the lines 
which are traced upon the paper. 

I do not object to written sermons. I 
do not object to their being read. There 
are occasions when every man resorts to 
that method, and for some men it may be 
ordinarily the best. But I do not believe 
that the extemporaneous preacher should 
be regarded as the exceptional man; nor 
that free speech in delivering the message 
of God to men is the ideal form, in the 
sense of its being the prerogative of the 
elect few. That assumption nips a whole- 
some ambition in the bud, and will 
make a young man who conscientiously 
attempts it feel, in spite of himself, that 
he is regarded as vain and conceited. 
The extemporaneous method is the ideal 
method, only because it is the normal 
method. It is not the easiest. It is, of 
all methods, the most exacting and per- 
ilous. It exposes to the greatest ex- 
tremes, and makes havoc of any attempt 
to maintain a fair average. But its very 
difficulties constitute its practical power. 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 225 

It kej^s the preacher to the utmost physical, 
mental, and moral tension. It brings out 
all the man there is in him; while the 
erectness of his posture, the kindling of 
his eye, the naturalness of his tone, them- 
selves constitute an instrument of convic- 
tion. It is worth all it costs ; and there 
are few men who, by diligent and faithful 
endeavor through a series of years, cannot 
become acceptable and forcible masters of 
extemporaneous speech, while many men 
part with half of their power through an 
early and long-continued surrender to the 
written manuscript. You may not publish 
as many volumes of sermons if you pursue 
this method, for a sermon uttered in free, 
conversational speech hardly ever reads 
well ,- but then sermons are not read much 
anyhow, and when you remember how 
widely and eagerly Robertson's sketches 
have been read, not one of which was 
written before he preached it, you will 
conclude that a sermon lives not because 
it was carefully written, but because it was 
preached at white heat. There is no 
special need, that I know of, why there 
should be an increase of sermonic literature, 
and an average of one printed sermon in 



226 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

twenty years for every minister in the 
United States would add annually five 
hundred volumes to our libraries ; so that, 
on the whole, we might as well be content 
to let the ordinary sermon do its work at 
the moment of its utterance. Strike that 
one blow with all the power that you can 
muster. 

But it is not enough for you to preach 
in such a way that men cannot fail to 
understand you. You must command not 
only their attention, but their approval. 
By this I do not mean that you are to be 
anxious of popular applause. Behind many 
a cheer there is a covert sneer, and at the 
heart of many a curse there is involuntary 
homage. Popularity is neither to be 
sought nor to be avoided; but the assent 
of the moral judgment should be every 
preacher's earnest and constant aim — com- 
mending himself to every man's conscience 
in the sight of God. The Gospel which 
you are commissioned to preach is for 
every man and for all men. It ignore^ all 
differences of rank, and distinctions of 
race, in its urgent appeals to repentance, 
in its ethical instructions, and in its gracious 
promises. It is no respecter of persons. 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 227 

That does not mean that it looks with 
equal contempt upon everybody, but with 
equal and genuine regard. It maintains 
inviolate the prerogatives and privileges, 
the duties and the dignities, of each and 
all. It speaks a universal language, touch- 
ing upon matters which come home to all 
with equal force. The preacher should 
never permit himself to speak in such a 
way as to divide his audience into parties, 
whose concurrent moral judgment he is 
unable to command. 

This rules out the discussion of all topics, 
however vital and important in their way, 
on which equally honest men may earnestly 
disagree. Never meddle with party poli- 
tics in the pulpit. It is the devil's snare. 
The ethical principles involved in the con- 
stitution and the administration of govern- 
ment, and in the discharge of the duties of 
citizenship, are legitimate themes for dis- 
cussion by the preacher; but the applica- 
tion of these principles to specific cases 
must be left to every man's independent 
and intelligent decision. If you advise 
him from the pulpit, you are assuming the 
role of a political boss, and the resentment 
will be natural and righteous. And even 



228 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

in the inculcation of the ethical principles 
of political economy, it is the part of 
wisdom to make them prominent when 
the popular pulse is not feverish. Election 
sermons accomplish little good, however 
cautious the argument, and however unob- 
jectionable the matter, because j r our hearers 
will be perpetually wondering what ticket 
you are trying to help. Don't preach on 
temperance on the Sunday before the polls 
open, when the prohibition candidates are 
canvassing for votes. You may injure a good 
cause by advocating it at an inopportune 
time ; and even if you are a pronounced 
political prohibitionist on conscientious 
moral grounds, many of your hearers are 
not, and they have as good a right to 
judge for themselves in matters of practical 
legislation as you have. Take the stump, 
if you want to, though I think you had 
better not; but at all events, let your 
pulpit voice only the authority of Jesus 
Christ. A prominent New York pastor 
told me recently that the most effective 
sermon which he ever preached on Christian 
giving fell upon a Sunday, when the bas- 
kets were not passed, and the people knew 
that they would not be. He did it delib- 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 229 

erately, and the result amazed him. When 
the next collection was taken, everybody 
was eager to give, and the contributions 
doubled. They stayed there, too. The 
effect was permanent. There is in this a 
practical hint of the greatest importance, 
that the minister's best work is always 
done when no one can suspect that he is 
posing as a special pleader. 

Few things are of greater practical im- 
portance, than securing, and keeping, the 
confidence of your hearers in your per- 
sonal integrity, and in your enthusiastic 
devotion to your work. Respect for the 
cloth is rapidly disappearing. You must 
be a man among men. Do not whine. 
Do not fish for compliments. Do not go 
about with hat in hand as if you were a 
beggar. Live within your income, and if 
it is not paid promptly, appeal to the man- 
liness of your church or parish officers. 
Be a straightforward business man in busi- 
ness matters. Make both ends meet. You 
can do it as easily as the men to whom you 
preach, the majority of whom do not handle 
as much money as you do. Pay your debts 
promptly, and do not suffer them to accu- 
mulate until your people become ashamed 



230 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

of you and cancel them for you. Such 
favors will destroy your self-respect, and 
make you the object of silent but severe 
contempt. Wherever you are, do your 
best. Do not permit yourself to regard 
your parish as only a temporary abode, a 
stepping-stone to something more desira- 
ble and more worthy of you. The men 
who do that, as I could easily prove to 
you by reference to living examples, are 
the bitterly disappointed men, who end 
their days in neglected sadness. He«who 
seeks his life is sure to lose it. Self-for- 
getfulness must be your habitual temper. 
You may see inferior men preferred to you. 
Honors may come to them, while you are 
ignored. If so, do not complain. Do not 
become morose. Do not permit yourself 
to cherish the idea that you are slighted, 
or the victim of a conspiracy. Do your 
own work all the more heartily. Give it 
all your time and strength. Your church 
has a right to them, and you will make a 
most stupendous blunder if you imagine 
that, by dispersing your activity, you can 
increase your influence. 

Be a king at home, and surrender the 
domestic reins to no other hands. Be 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 231 

chary of pulpit exchanges. Preach in your 
own pulpit, and let your own people see 
that you do this on principle, and by de- 
liberate preference. And whenever you 
preach, always do your best. Do not 
hoard your resources, doling them out by 
weight and measure, holding back more 
than you give, from fear that no new sup- 
plies can be gathered. Empty the cup- 
board. The healthiest state you can be 
in on Sunday night is that of complete 
exhaustion, not physical, but intellectual ; 
the feeling that you have pumped your- 
self dry. That will compel you to fresh 
and deeper study. That will foster the 
temper of mental vigilance ; and that will 
make you grow. And your people will be 
quick to discern the generosity and unself- 
ishness of your disposition. Devotion will 
provoke devotion. Confident of your in- 
tegrity and fidelity, they will make all due 
allowances for you. They will not expect 
you to strike twelve every time you preach ; 
and you will be surprised to find how much 
of good they discern in your most stum- 
bling speech. Give yourself wholly to them, 
and put your whole soul into every service, 
and you will not fail to fasten them to you 



232 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

as by bands of tempered steel. They will 
not grow weary of you when you grow 
old. The dead line in the ministry, as in 
any other calling, is the line of laziness. 
The lawyer cannot use last year's briefs. 
The physician cannot depend on last week's 
diagnosis. The merchant cannot assume 
that a customer of ten years' standing will 
not be enticed elsewhere. And the preacher 
must be a live, wide-awake, growing man. 
Let him dye his brains, not his hair. Let 
his thought be fresh, and his speech be 
glowing. Sermons, it has well been said, 
are like bread, which is delicious when it 
is fresh ; but which, when a month old, is 
hard to cut, harder to eat, and hardest of 
all to digest. Be resolute in this matter. 
Some of your friends may urge you to take 
things more easily. There is danger in 
overwork; but laziness is more generally 
the ministerial besetting danger and sin ; 
and as soon as a man yields to that, he 
will find the people becoming listless, and 
one by one dropping out of their pews. It 
is your business to keep them full, so far 
as Christian earnestness and fidelity, on 
your part, can do it. 

I have but one more suggestion to make, 



THE PRACTICAL ELEMENT. 233 

and that is this : Never fail to make your 
hearers feel their plenary personal respon- 
sibility. Every utterance of the pulpit 
must urge, either explicitly or implicitly, 
to moral decision and action. The hearers 
must be made to see that there is something 
for them to do, and that it must be done 
at once, that the moral obligation may be 
neither evaded nor postponed. However 
broad the range of your preaching, it must 
always grapple with the individual con- 
science, and summon the soul to bow to 
the moral judgment which it passes upon 
itself. This is bringing men face to face 
with God in Jesus Christ ; and such preach- 
ing cannot fail to be in power, and in the 
demonstration of the Holy Ghost. 

My task is done. I have spoken plainly 
and strongly, but not unadvisedly. I have 
brought you the sifted wheat of a quarter 
of a century of ministerial experience ; and 
I leave you to separate from it the chaff 
that may be mixed with it. I have put 
my profoundest personal convictions into 
these lectures, under the feeling that in 
this way I could serve you best in the dis- 
charge of my duty. I thank you for your 
patient attention. It has been a pleasure 



234 PHILOSOPHY OF PREACHING. 

for me to meet you. I shall always be 
glad to give you the grasp of a brother's 
hand ; and I shall not cease to pray for you, 
that your ministry may be abundantly 
fruitful, bringing glory to our Lord, cheer 
and strength to your fellow-men, and a 
deepening joy to your own hearts. Let 
me close with the great apostle's earnest 
charge to Timothy : 

u Be thou an example of the believers, in 
word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, 
in faith, in purity. Grive attendance to 
reading, to exhortation, to doctrine. Neglect 
not the gift that is in thee, which was given 
thee by prophecy, with the laying on of the 
hands of the presbytery. Meditate upon 
these things ; give thyself wholly to them, 
that thy profiting may appear to all. Take 
heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine ; 
continue in them ; for in doing this thou 
shalt both save thyself and them that hear 
thee." 



Typography by J. S. Cushing & Co., Boston, Mass. 



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